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That's a massive shift.
It absolutely is. It would also absolutely be achievable, but there would need to be a fundamental attitude change along with things like big investments into carbon neutral public transport, while cars are being banned and taxed to high heaven left right and centre. I can't really see it happening realistically, but I won't give up hope we can at least vaguely move in the right direction.
As a side note:
Electricity was easy - any house/bushiness/process designed to use electricity can use green electricity from a turbine down the same wires as from a coal power station.
That part is easy, yes, but electrical / power engineers will tell you that the distribution of power in itself is a super complex thing, and getting it from many individual turbines vs one big coal power plant is not as straight forward as the slightly naive thinking of "well you 'hook it up' to the grid" that us non-electrical-engineers tend to have. Again, totally doable, but even that 'easy' bit isn't that easy when you drill down into it.
SwissChap-
Yeah, clearly over simplified but the point being that nothing in my house has had to be modified in anyway for it to shift from being 100% powered by coal to 100% powered by wind. The changes can happen without involving "the public" at all which make it a gazzilion% easier.
The government policies to get people off natural gas are going to seem much more interventionist, hence reluctance from politicians to make any actual decisions.
Scrabble
Couldn't agree more. Just illustrates my point that offshore wind is not really an example of how we're going to solve this thing. You could argue that the successful de-carbonisation of electricity is masking the scale of the challenges elsewhere - where we're really not making any progress.
Going back to @SwissChap's point - if we can decarbonise electricity (and heat) does this lead to all the raw materials and production process also being de-carbonised?
If an electric digger extracts the ore, and the process to refine this into steel/aluminium also uses green energy, surely the carbon footprint of the product improves along the way. I fear its this route we're going to take rather than the "stop driving around so much" option.
Over the "boom" of cycling in the last decade, and the roll out of cycle infrastructure, its thought this has only led to a reduction in car journeys of about 0.1%. I've heard we need at least a 10% reduction to get close to the net zero 2050 ambition. That's a massive shift.
On the space heating point - the issue we have in the UK is that getting people to use electric heating is really difficult - huge numbers of people have houses and heating systems designed around gas or oil.
Getting these people to change is really difficult. Electricity was easy - any house/bushiness/process designed to use electricity can use green electricity from a turbine down the same wires as from a coal power station.
If you currently use gas for anything you're going to either need green gas, of which there won't be enough, or rip it all out and install something different at considerable cost. Doing this round the whole country is hugely difficult, hence why the government still haven't published a clean heat plan that explains how we're going to meet future carbon budgets.