GDP growth cannot be decoupled from greenhouse gas emission growth.
Even tech services require building and running an infrastructure to back them up.
The contribution of the sector to greenhouse gas emissions is non-trivial and increasing.
Continuing on a growth path inevitably leads us to total failure.
Unless we can manage degrowth for an extended period of time, we're done.
This is of course heresy and cannot even be discussed.
I know what you're thinking and no, there is simply not enough time left to implement a technical solution and/or decouple growth&energy, sorry.
Meanwhile - pr babble and CV19 pause aside - we as a species are ramping up fossil fuel extraction and getting ready to exploit the thawing arctic.
I don't have to single out a nation or an energy company, because it's all of them. See investor letters and fossil market outlook communications.
We all must do everything we can to buy more time - but at this point in time technology can only be a plaster on gangrene.
Force policy change and force economists to come up with a new economic model.
And force yourself to accept a cut in your standard of living.
The carbon tax and tech solutions are a must but won't be enough, due to lack of time.
The science tells us we don't have much to turn things around, not nearly enough.
Based on our history of energy transitions, even rolling out commercially available tech for low/zero carbon generation left to market forces will take many decades, almost a century.
Then there are hard problems we simply have no low/zero carbon solution for at scale.
Manufacturing pig iron for primary steel, ammonia, cement, industrial agriculture, plastics, shipping, aviation, etc.
Also, AFAIK there does not exist a demonstrated technology for CO2 sequestration that scales and has the required CO2 emission balance (needs energy to run).
Storage is also unsolved.
I'm curious if you have a link.
It took a century to build out the global oil infrastructure with its millions of miles of pipelines, pumps, oil tankers, etc.
We'll need to handle multiple times the material flow for CO2 sequestration.
And overhaul/retrofit/upgrade the entire global energy system, industry, transportation, shipping, agriculture...
Even allowing for existing sequestration tech - there's no time.
We need a quick head start that only cutting back consumption can give us.
10% of the population is responsible for 50% of global anthropogenic emissions.
If the top 1% of emitters or the ~75 million people at the top cut back their consumption to the level of the average European's, global emissions would decrease by 30%.
The current economics paradigm (~growth is a must) guarantees we can't solve climate change as growth cannot be decoupled from CO2 increase.
This is a physics problem. Physics doesn't care about ROI or discount rates or tactics.
We were given a diagnosis of terminal cancer quite some time ago and we refused to do chemo or undergo surgery because it would have meant a drastic change in our lifestyle.
Now we are stage three.
We still meet with our oncologist team from time to time, only to actively sabotage all of their attempts to save us.
In 1988 the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In 31 years, after 51 IPCC sessions and 25 major conferences our yearly CO2 emissions increased by 60%.
That's how much we care.
In 2019,
Energy companies are still set on fully realizing their extractions rights and are actively seeking new oil and gas fields to exploit, including in the thawing arctic.
We're still buliding 1500+ new coal power plants and hundreds of airports.
We're busy entrenching our fossil fuel dependence.
Anthropogenic CO2 emissions are still on the rise.
FAANG are also knowingly and willingly breaching the GDPR to this day with all sorts of products.
Just try to exercise your GPDR-given rights as an EU citizen and try getting ALL of your data from e.g. Facebook.
Not the subset of it that you are allowed to download, ALL of it.
You'll be laughed at really, really hard then shown the door.
Don't get me started on Microsoft.