Griffin on Tech: Can tech really help slash emissions?
Industry body, the NZ Tech Alliance yesterday published a report highlighting an inconvenient truth for Aotearoa.
We aren’t doing nearly enough to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to meet our 2050 net zero target. In fact, the Independent Climate Action Tracker has assessed our climate response as “highly insufficient”.
We may have a lot of renewable energy at our disposal as a country rich with hydro and geothermal power generaiton, but here’s the stark reality - in 2021, we emitted 16.9 tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent), the sixth-highest emissions per capita in the OECD.
We’ve been slow to cut emissions from industry, transport, and agriculture which accounts for nearly half of our emissions overall, but which is particularly difficult to make significant emissions reductions in without either significant destocking of dairy cows, or the application of some silver bullet tech solutions that don’t yet exist, to cut methane and nitrous oxide emissions.
I’ve closely followed the efforts of the Global Alliance and other groups attempting to pursue vaccines and inhibitors to tackle the methane problem in agriculture. They seem to progress at a glacial pace. Is that because the problem is incredibly difficult to solve, or because we haven’t invested enough time, money and effort pursuing solutions?
I suspect its a mix of both. But one thing is for sure - New Zealand has vastly underestimated the role of technological innovation in reducing our emissions footprint.
As the Tech Alliance report notes: “New Zealand’s first Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) is generally considered to have minimised the role technology can play enabling the country’s emissions response.
“This was recognised by the Minister for Climate Change who conceded it was an oversight to underplay the role of technology when targets were set,” it adds.
Why did that happen? I think it comes down to an ideological aversion in our scientific community, and among many of our policy makers and politicians, to seriously considering the role technology can play in reducing emissions.
A plan for a Climate Technology Roadmap. Source: NZ Tech Alliance
Many see it as a cop-out, an excuse not to decarbonise the economy, but keep burning oil in the hope that the emissions could somehow be cancelled out by some sort of magical negative emissions.
It’s a glib point of view because it ignores the huge potential of existing technology to shave emissions in every industry, adding up to big cuts across the board. For instance, the introduction of the electric arc furnace at NZ Steel’s Glenbrook steel mill will reduce the company’s emissions by 45%, 1% of NZ’s annual emissions. We can argue over who should pay for the technology, and whether the government’s subsidisation of industry to go green is warranted. But the emissions-saving tech already exists.
A Spark-commissioned report published in 2022 estimated that 42% of New Zealand’s 2030 emissions budget “could be met by actions enabled by digital technology”.
That may seem like a hopelessly optimistic scenario, but it is broadly in line with international studies, such as the work of the World Economic Forum and Accenture which suggested that one-fiftth of all the reductions needed to achieve 2050 net-zero goals in energy, materials, and mobility could be achieved through adoption of digital technologies.
“There is no green without digital,” the WEF points out. “It is the ultimate enabling process. As well as getting greener itself – studies suggest that 5G networks are up to 90% more energy efficient per traffic unit than legacy 4G networks, for example – digitalization also unlocks huge environmental gains in other sectors.”
Weighing up the costs
We’ve been slower than other advanced economies to emply digital technologies that can not only boost productivity, but cut emissions in the process. Here’s the financial reality we now face according to the Tech Alliance:
“Treasury and the Ministry for the Environment (MfE) indicative assessment indicates the direct costs for increased investment on a series of key mitigation technologies up to 2050 could be $155 million to $460 million per annum ($4 billion to $12 billion over the period).”
If we don’t invest these sums in technology, we’ll need to buy carbon offsets overseas to achieve our emissions reduction targets - at a higher cost than investing in mitigation technology.
“The cost range for these purchases, based on MfE’s projection for the country’s domestic emissions, is between $8.8 billion and $20.6 billion.”
So yes, technology can help slash emissions, but out existing tech and innovation ecosystem isn’t going to do the job. That’s why the Tech Alliance’s recommendation of a Climate Technology Roadmap makes a lot of sense, giving industry, the government, and Kiwis in general, a clear idea of where we need to make progress on technology adoption, and doing things more efficiently with digitisation.
It’s an opportunity to get smarter about what we produce and export, and to develop some world-leading innovations in the process. But we need to make sure that massive uptake of power-hungry applications like computer processing to power the AI revolution don’t cancel out the gains we make from tech improvements elsewhere.
