Tuesday 14th December 2021
Real-zero – embracing ubiquitous resources and solutions”
Was COP26 a good COP or a bad COP? There is some consensus that the Glasgow conference offered practical solutions and good pledges but, in counterbalance, there are significant concerns that future action will be protracted.
Of course, politics does not provide the solutions; this is the domain of engineers, scientists, and technologists. Unfortunately, they were few in number at COP26 but for the significant presence of incumbent technologies. At present, there may be too many potential options that are future carbon cul-de-sacs and too many future roadmaps that show promise but are, at best, improbable.
In this talk, I will briefly touch on cul-de-sacs full of fossil fuels and roadmaps that cannot provide global-scale solutions. Despite this doom and gloom, there may be good-news routes that can lead us not just to net-zero but towards real-zero. Building upon appropriate ubiquitous resources, our global future has the potential to not only be sustainable but also more equitable and just. All these views, of course, are my own!
Bill David is STFC Senior Fellow at the ISIS Neutron Source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Professor of Energy Materials Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His interests are principally centred around sustainable carbon-free renewable energy storage.