Of course, however, is there anything where the conversion has been from electic to petrol / gas / coal? My car is going electic, my bolier is going electric. This isnt new, it has been the path of travel for a while now.
Unless Nvidia has really f'd up their calculations my 5090 graphics card isnt going to be coal powered.
“Coal-fired power stations emit over 10 Gt of carbon dioxide each year,[4] about one fifth of world greenhouse gas emissions, so are the single largest cause of climate change”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station
The counter factual; if the 60% of electricity coming form wind or sunshine at this instant was from coal, then 10 Gt of carbon dioxide each year becomes 20/30/40/50 Gt of carbon dioxide each year and global emmisions are significantly more than what they are now.
Purely hypothetical, but it is where we were.
Unfortunately without the panic we wouldn't have even gotten where we are. The last decade's progress has been excellent, but there was 20 years of stagnation before that. The latest nuclear plant that was opened in the UK was in 1995, and we've not successfully built another since. Meanwhile gas plants have served their entire lifecycle and been decommissioned in that time frame, and are still actively being built (but thankfully no longer planned).
> However, the full picture isn't so glamorous once you take all energy types into account
Why not? Electricity is one of the biggest of energy, and is growing as transport (which is the second largest source of energy usage) is electrifying. Cleaning our electricity sources and moving our largest polluters to electricity is a great path forward. Theres no silver bullet here but what we're doing is pretty much the biggest impact we can make. We should have done it 20 years ago, and we should be doing it quicker now though.
The next biggest source of emissions is from agriculture, mostly from deforestation and oversimplifying for the sake of an internet comment, if the EU, China and the US just ate less beef, that problem would mostly solve itself.
This has been pretty well known in my country at least.
However, the full picture isn't so glamorous once you take all energy types into account.
But I agree with you that generally too much panic is being created.