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Opinion | Two ways Hong Kong must transform to achieve carbon neutrality
- The ambition of the Hong Kong Climate Action Plan 2050 is laudable, but to realise it, the city needs more transformational thinking
- Building on the new blueprint, Hong Kong should open up its electricity market and move energy-intensive industrial activities out of the city
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Why you can trust SCMP
Hong Kong’s new Climate Action Plan 2050 is a terrific start, but when reading it, I could not help thinking of a newspaper cartoon I saw years ago – two business managers were talking and one said to the other, “Get me the boldest, most ambitious plan to continue doing exactly what we are doing right now.”
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The big takeaways from the plan are to keep the electricity generation infrastructure largely the same, but replace coal and gas with hydrogen and import more renewable energy from the Greater Bay Area.
We’ll keep transport largely the same, but substitute fossil fuel vehicles with electric cars. We can improve the energy performance of buildings too, which is to say, to continue what we are doing now.
In other words, we want bold and ambitious action, but only if things can generally stay the same as they are now.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you are an optimist like me) transformational change is the new normal. The assumption that 2050 will look like 2021 is no more accurate than today looking like 1990, when internet and mobile phone use was not widespread.
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So why do we think that tweaks around the edges and incremental change are sufficient to meet the challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to a net-zero level by 2050?
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