Why the 'Solutions' to Climate Change Were Never Enough

A journey of waking up to the harsh reality of environmental collapse, shattering illusions of progress and stability.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.“ – Mark Twain

I didn’t set out to be an alarmist or a pessimist. But when I started reading about global warming, energy, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and beyond, the world I thought I understood began to unravel. The deeper I went, the clearer it became: this isn’t just a collection of isolated issues; it’s an entire system falling apart at every level.

At first, I tried to disprove what I was uncovering, thinking I might have fallen for a conspiracy theory. I tried to debunk all the books and articles that made me uncomfortable. I tried to find evidence that we could avoid this crisis. Surely, there must be a plan and some viable solutions. But under scrutiny, most plans turned out to be wishful thinking, and the solutions proved to be surface-level fixes aimed at extending our unsustainable lifestyles rather than addressing their core contradictions. Many aren’t even viable given the time constraints, energy, and materials they would require.

The more I learned, the more questions surfaced, and the more unsettling the answers became. The things I once took for granted, such as progress, technology, the promise of a better future, started to seem like a façade, propped up by temporary abundance and a collective denial of our ecological limits.

The world no longer made any sense.

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My journey started in economics, that’s what I studied at university (B.Sc. and M.Sc.) and, let’s be honest, most of us are obsessed with money. The most important thing to understand about our current economic system is that it has a growth imperative. It’s either grow or die, thanks to how money, debt, and interest work, and how our societies are structured.

This raised two big questions:

1. Can we keep growing forever?

2. What drives our economic growth in the first place?

With our current system, for the economy to keep growing, we need a growing population consuming roughly the same every year, or a lower number of people consuming more per capita. The bottom line is that overall consumption must grow. To fuel that consumption, we need a lot of materials (resources), and a lot of energy that’s cheap, abundant, and constantly increasing. Without cheap energy and abundant resources, economic growth would grind to a halt, businesses would go bust, unemployment would rise, and the economic system would implode.

A closer look at energy and climate

Because energy is so fundamental to economic growth, I felt it was important to dive deeper into the topic, and climate change stood out to me as the biggest threat to humanity and a massive disruptor of our growth, so I wanted to understand what we’re truly up against. At the same time, I thought we were in the middle of a green transition aimed at avoiding the worst impacts of this crisis, so I wanted to understand what that transition really involves.

Studying the science behind climate change and reading the latest scientific papers was when I realized that the situation is much worse than I had thought. It’s far worse than what you’ll read on most news websites or hear on TV. Wet bulb temperatures, food shortages, water scarcity, mass migrations, the civil unrest that would follow, it terrified me. But the real horror lies in the tipping points and feedback loops. You can read my summary of the science in this article.

Studying energy unraveled another blind spot. Fossil fuels aren’t just our primary energy source, they’re the foundation of modern civilization. They’re not only fuels for transportation, heating, and electricity. Everything from steel, cement, plastics, and fertilizers depends on them. Fossil fuels power the machines that build our cities, the ships and trucks that move goods, and the farms that feed billions. They also power the entire green transition, every bit of mining and transportation is run on and subsidized by cheap fossil fuels.

With the declining Energy Return on Investment (EROI), this foundation is eroding much faster than most realize. As fossil fuels become more energy-intensive to extract, the cost of everything will rise, and eventually it will halt everything, including our so-called transition, far sooner than we’re prepared for.

But we have solutions to climate change, don’t we?

Reading the IEA¹ and IPCC² energy transition reports, the plan goes something like this:

• electrify transportation (EV’s)

• use blue/green hydrogen for parts that are difficult to electrify (such as heavy industry, long-haul transportation i.e. trucks, ships and planes)

• use carbon capture to remove CO2

• rely on renewable energy and energy storage to power our civilization.

Sounds like a plan.

Needless to say, I had some serious concerns about how realistic this actually is, and since we’re betting our very existence on it, I felt I needed to dig deeper to understand it to put my mind at ease, because clearly, climate change is accelerating, and we don’t have an endless amount of time to make this work.

What about nuclear?

Not really part of the official plan, but worth reviewing because I know someone will bring it up.

Nuclear seems like a clean, efficient alternative, but it’s not that simple. It requires vast amounts of water for cooling, making it vulnerable to water availability, extreme weather events and rising sea levels. We would need thousands of new reactors to meet global energy needs, but building and maintaining them requires a lot of time and resources. Uranium is a finite resource, meaning we can’t rely on nuclear forever.

Perhaps most importantly, if, for some reason, nuclear plants are abandoned, it becomes a ticking time bomb. Cooling systems fail, radioactive waste is left unmanaged, and contamination risks soar.

Nuclear is not a straightforward solution and it is a risky bet that we will be around to decommission them safely.

Do we have the materials and minerals to build out the green transition?

Nobody really knows, and to be fair, how could we possibly know. The Earth is massive, and there’s no clear answer on exactly how many EV’s, solar panels, wind turbines, or energy storage systems we’ll need in the future. But we will definitely need a lot of copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, graphite, rare earth elements, aluminum, silicon, iridium, zinc, steel and cement. Do we have enough of the materials?

This report says we do, this report says we don’t. I guess there’s a lot of uncertainty.

What is clear from both reports is that this is a long shot. It would require ramping up mining for all key minerals very quickly and in some cases by up to 40 times what we’re extracting today. And remember, we always start with the easy stuff, so it’s only going to get harder, more energy-intensive, and more expensive.

Mining, refining, and building all this green infrastructure depends entirely on fossil fuels, which, as mentioned earlier, are becoming harder and more expensive to extract due to declining EROI. Fossil fuels aren’t just needed for the first wave; they’re needed for maintaining and replacing everything.

EVs, wind turbines, and solar panels wear out in decades, requiring extensive spare parts and eventually complete replacement. We might scrape together enough for round one, but round two? Not happening. Declining EROI will choke the system.

Executing this plan would also require a global effort, and that means politics, the global economy, supply chains, and our climate system would need to remain stable. We’re in a race against time, and politically, things aren’t looking great.

But let’s not give up hope yet. Let’s look at some of the solutions.

Blue and green hydrogen – for trucks, aviation, shipping and industry

I don’t think most people really know what hydrogen is (I didn’t), so let’s start there. Hydrogen is a gas that can store and transport energy, but we still have to create the energy from heat or electricity. Think of hydrogen as a battery in gas form.

Today, 99% of hydrogen is created from fossil fuels (natural gas) through a process called steam methane reforming (SMR), this is fairly cheap to do but creates a lot of CO2. If that CO2 is stored i.e. carbon capture and storage (CCS), we call it blue hydrogen. Where do we store the CO2? In underground geological formations, such as depleted oil and gas fields, and deep saline aquifers.

Another method, called electrolysis, splits water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. If that electricity comes from renewables, we call it green hydrogen. This is expensive and energy intensive. Only 1% of hydrogen today is green. I guess it’s not very profitable.

Then there are some serious challenges with hydrogen. It’s so light, that it can leak out of tanks, and storing it requires either high-pressure tanks or cooling it to super low temperatures, which takes a lot of energy. Sounds very sustainable.

Also, the process of creating hydrogen itself isn’t very energy-efficient. To make 1 kg of hydrogen, requires around 50 kWh of energy. Enough to power a home for a few days. But that 1 kg of hydrogen only contains about 33 kWh of usable energy. We lose 30-40% of the energy in the conversion process.

According to the IEA, by 2050, we need close to 400 million tons of hydrogen per year to replace fossil fuels in the industries and heavy transport that can’t be electrified. That’s a massive increase from what we produce today, and scaling up would require a huge increase in renewable energy capacity just to make green hydrogen. Right now, we’re nowhere near close to making that much blue and green hydrogen.

“Hydrogen production reached 97 Mt in 2023, of which less than 1% was low-emissions.”

So, we produced 1 million tons of blue and green hydrogen in 2023, and we need 400 million tons of it by 2050. It should be no surprise that a lot of these blue and green hydrogen plans are being abandoned by energy companies and governments.

And what about carbon capture?

The IPCC is pinning their hopes on direct air capture (DAC) and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Let’s take a closer look at both.

A single DAC machine captures 1,000 to 4,000 tons of CO2 per year, while we’re emitting 40 000 000 000 tons annually. Even if we built millions of these machines, they wouldn’t make much of a dent and they obviously wouldn’t stop climate change. With over 2.5 trillion tons of excess CO2 already in the atmosphere, relying on DAC for a meaningful impact on climate change is ridiculous.

And DAC doesn’t run on air, they need a huge amount of energy. The machines are built using fossil fuel-powered equipment and require metals, rare earth elements, and chemicals. So scaling up would hit resource limits fast. Then there’s the cost of storing the captured CO2, which ranges from $100–$600 per ton. And where would we store it? We’re still working out those details.

BECCS works like this. Basically we grow plants (they sequester CO2) and burn them for fuel (bioenergy), but we capture the emissions when we burn the biomass and store the CO2…somewhere to be determined.

The IPCC says there’s a potential to sequester 11 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050 with BECCS. Reminder that we have already emitted 2500 gigatons of CO2.

From IPCC:

“The climate change mitigation potential for bioenergy and BECCS is large (up to 11 GtCO2 yr–1); however, the effects of bioenergy production on land degradation, food insecurity, water scarcity, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and other environmental goals are scale- and context-specific (high confidence). These effects depend on the scale of deployment, initial land use, land type, bioenergy feedstock, initial carbon stocks, climatic region and management regime (high confidence). Large areas of monoculture bioenergy crops that displace other land uses can result in land competition, with adverse effects for food production, food consumption, and thus food security, as well as adverse effects for land degradation, biodiversity, and water scarcity (medium confidence).”

In other words, we have a slim chance of potentially sequestering around 25% of our current annual emissions by 2050, if everything goes perfectly. Achieving this would come at a significant cost to our environment, including impacts on soil, food production, and water resources, with no guarantee it can be executed effectively. Even if it works, where we would store such massive amounts of CO2 remains unclear, and the risk of it leaking back into the atmosphere is a serious concern.

What a mess. I don’t see how we can avert climate change, and I certainly can’t see how we could keep growing while dealing with it.

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It didn’t take long before I found myself reading Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome (1972) and Overshoot by William Catton Jr. (1980), among other related literature. These books completely shifted my perspective. I realized that the so-called solutions we’re chasing don’t even address the root cause of the problem, they’re just desperate attempts to keep our growth trajectory going, even though it's fundamentally unsustainable.

Our obsession with growth has caused all these issues and wrecked our planet. The last thing we should be doing is trying to maintain this growth.

What are we really trying to preserve, our lifestyles, or our future?

When I delved into biology and ecology, I started to understand how off track we are as a species. It introduced me to overshoot, the concept of consuming more than ecosystems can regenerate, which eventually leads to a die-off when resources run out. All species are bound to overshoot if the conditions allow. This isn’t some abstract theory; it’s a biological and ecological fact.

When you think in terms of millennia, it’s obvious that our current way of life is utterly unsustainable and hasn’t been vetted by evolution. Ecology teaches us that every species must live within the limits of its environment if it wants to survive on longer time scales, and humanity is no exception. The only way we could have lived for millions of years into the future as a species was how we did for most of our existence: in balance with nature. Everything since then has been a detour. We threw a big party and drove ourselves off the cliff.

Biodiversity loss, deforestation, and ecosystem collapse aren’t distant threats. They’re unfolding now. And it’s not about saving nature for its own sake, it’s about survival. We are part of these systems, not separate from them.

“Without a biosphere in a good shape, there is no life on the planet. It’s very simple. That’s all you need to know.” – Vaclav Smil

Studying history and anthropology, it's clear this isn’t the first time we’ve overshot our resources and collapsed. All civilizations made the same mistake, overusing their resources until they ran out, because civilization itself goes against the very ecological principles that have kept life on Earth in balance for millions of years. But this time, the stakes are way higher, and there’s no new frontier to escape to.

Studying paleoclimatology and extinction events made it even clearer how utterly hopeless our situation is. Yes, Earth has recovered from catastrophic events in the past, but not quickly, and never while supporting civilizations that rely on stability like ours. Once you understand how fragile Earth's systems are, it’s like watching a slow-motion car crash you’re powerless to stop. We’re living through the fastest mass extinction event in history, and it’s entirely caused by us.

Collapse is here, whether we’re ready for it or not.

And most people are dead asleep. We’re arguing over trivialities while the foundations of our existence crumble. People stress over minor inconveniences, oblivious to the cascading crises around them. It’s surreal.

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It’s a lot to take in. The systems we depend on are failing, and the solutions we cling to are blind to energy, materials, and ecology. And the way we’re wired, dopamine-driven, short-term focused, makes meaningful change almost impossible without external forces forcing our hand.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. We’re hurtling toward what may be the ugliest and most devastating chapter in human history. Accepting this is not easy, but it’s inevitable once you understand the full scope of our predicament. The discomfort lies in realizing that there are no real solutions to this crisis, only outcomes.

Some have been predicting collapse for decades, yet, we’re still here. But life is not the same is it? Collapse has been going on for quite some time, I just hadn’t realized it.

If there’s any good news it’s that we likely won’t need to build out all that renewable energy infrastructure, EV’s, and so on, because collapse is already underway, and our population is set to decline. We’ll keep building until we can’t, and then we’ll be left to cope with what we’ve built. This may ease some of the pressure on Earth’s systems and the climate, unless, of course, we manage to nuke ourselves, trigger abrupt climate change, or collapse the biosphere before it can begin to recover.

I believe the reason so few are aware of these realities is that it takes real effort. Not only is it about reading a lot, it’s also about analyzing the solutions from a systems perspective, looking at how all the pieces fit together and questioning their long-term viability. It means stepping beyond the narrow confines of our own experiences, challenging deeply held assumptions, and considering the far-reaching, interconnected impacts of every decision. Even among scientists, many stay focused on their specialties and never broaden their view to see the bigger picture.

I’ve recommended articles and books to friends that could open their eyes to these realities. But the usual response is some variation of, “I don’t have time to read” or “It’s too depressing”. And that’s okay. Most people avoid this kind of knowledge because it threatens their sense of security. But occasionally, someone takes the plunge. They confront the uncomfortable truths, and when they do, it’s transformative. It’s as if they’ve unlocked a new way of seeing the world and that is when real change can start to happen.

That’s why I write these articles, it forces me to dig through the information in those reports, dive into unfamiliar fields, and engage with others who are willing to do the same. I’m not here to depress anyone. I just want to understand what’s happening, keep learning, and figure out how to navigate what’s coming. It’s not about optimism or pessimism. It’s about facing reality, however bleak, and trying to make sense of it all.

I’m not an expert. I’d love to be wrong about all of this. There’s a lot I don’t know, and even more I don’t know I don’t know.

1. https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050

2. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/