Southeast Asia Continues Hurtling Down the Net Zero Suicide Track

From Tilak’s Substack

Tilak Doshi

Net Zero may be on life support in the US and Europe, but Southeast Asia doesn’t appear to have got the note. Not, at least, if a new paper by leading scholars at the National University of Singapore published in a journal affiliated with the US National Academy of Sciences is any indication. Technically sophisticated, but based on economic modelling untethered from reality, it assumes what it should test, minimises costs without measuring them and ignores a host of political, institutional and technological obstacles.

The recently published paper ‘Charting net-zero pathways for ASEAN’s energy sector’ in PNAS Nexus by research scholars at the Energy Studies Institute at the National University of Singapore and ExxonMobil sets out to explore “pathways to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050” in Southeast Asia. Using a linear-programming model integrating electricity generation, regional power grids, carbon storage and hydrogen, the authors identify two stylised pathways: one dominated by wind, solar and battery storage, and another relying heavily on carbon capture and storage (CCS) alongside the use of so-called ‘green’ hydrogen. The paper concludes that regional grid connectivity can reduce storage and reserve needs, offering “clear insights” for policymakers as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations marches toward Net Zero.

The publication of such a paper, bearing the imprimatur of a journal affiliated with the US National Academy of Sciences, would have been unremarkable five years ago. Today, it borders on the surreal. Europe — the self-styled global leader of climate virtue — is quietly retreating from its more extreme green policies as de-industrialisation, energy insecurity and collapsing competitiveness concentrate political minds. The United States, under President Trump, has gone further still, withdrawing funding and political support from climate agreements and dismantling what officials openly call a global climate hoax. Last year’s UN COP30 climate conference in Brazil ended in disarray without even the usual aspirational closing statement to end use of fossil fuels and hasten the so-called energy transition.

And yet, against this backdrop of Western retreat and reassessment, ASEAN is urged — by its own scholars — to double down on Net Zero by 2050, as though the past decade of policy failures in countries and states leading the climate crusade – Germany, UK and California – had taught us nothing.

The central flaw of the paper is not its mathematics. It is its worldview.

Net Zero as a Modelling Constraint, Not an Economic Choice

The ASEAN paper begins by asserting that electricity demand in the region will more than triple by 2050, with electricity rising to nearly 60% of final energy use. It notes that over 73% of ASEAN’s current electricity generation still comes from fossil fuels and that industrialisation and urbanisation will drive massive energy demand growth. From this factual starting point, however, the analysis veers sharply into fantasy.

Net Zero by 2050 is imposed not as a hypothesis to be tested but as an article of faith — a binding constraint around which the model must contort reality. The result is an exercise in internal consistency rather than external validity. The model identifies ‘least-cost’ pathways, but only conditional on achieving Net Zero. There is no comparison with a business-as-usual pathway that prioritises affordability, reliability and economic growth. Crucially, there is no estimate of the welfare loss imposed by the constraint itself. In short, costs are minimised within the model but never measured against the real alternative: not pursuing Net Zero at all. It offers no basis for measuring opportunity cost, the basis of all economic policymaking.

This is not a trivial omission. It is the entire question.

Europe’s experience has demonstrated that the economic cost of decarbonisation is not marginal. It is systemic and economically suicidal. Sky-high electricity prices, collapsing heavy industry, fiscal strain from subsidies and declining living standards are not theoretical risks; they are observed outcomes of Europe’s climate-obsessed energy policies. Yet the ASEAN paper makes no attempt to quantify what Net Zero would cost ASEAN economies relative to continued reliance on coal, gas, and oil — fuels that have underwritten every successful industrialisation in history.

For instance, using actual cost data, one 2020 study found the EU faces a capital cost commitment of the current EU renewable capacity installed of €520 billion. Of this, the excess cost over gas-fired capacity is €450 billion. The long-term (60 years) capital and operating cost commitment of the current EU renewables 65 Gigawatts installed is approximately €2,000 billion, of which the excess costs over gas-firing is €1,800 billion. Note that these excess costs only consider the existing renewables capacity (in 2020) in the EU, not the costs of Net Zero by 2050 which would be a multiple of the excess costs reported.

Kathryn Porter calculates that had Britain continued with its legacy gas-based power system in the period since 2006 instead of going full bore with levies and mandates for wind and solar power as it has, consumers would have been almost £220 billion better off (in 2025 terms) even after taking into account the impact of the gas price increases in 2022 due to the Ukraine war.

Renewables: Intermittency Ignored, System Costs Evaded

Wind and solar form the backbone of the paper’s “renewables-led” pathway. Their intermittency is acknowledged but treated as a technical characteristic rather than a fundamental economic flaw. Storage, reserves and regional grid integration are assumed to smooth variability. But the paper never confronts the empirical literature showing that system costs rise sharply — not fall — as intermittent generation increases.

The European experience is again instructive. As the share of weather-dependent renewables has risen, so too have electricity prices, grid instability and the need for duplicated backup capacity. The excess system costs of wind and solar — once transmission, curtailment, reserve margins and storage are included — have been documented extensively. Yet in the ASEAN paper, these costs are either abstracted away or buried in model assumptions that lack transparency

The problem is not merely financial. ASEAN’s geography and development realities make the renewable fantasy even less plausible. Land intensity, material requirements and grid fragility loom far larger in densely populated or archipelagic nations than in Europe. Solar and wind are not simply ‘clean’ substitutes; they are sprawling industrial systems with enormous upstream footprints in mining, manufacturing and logistics — often outsourced to China and powered by coal.

The Trans-ASEAN Power Grid: A Mirage Revisited

The paper places great faith in regional grid connectivity to offset intermittency and reduce storage requirements. This is not a new idea. The Trans-ASEAN Power Grid (APG) has been a flagship aspiration since the late 1990s. A quarter of a century later, progress remains modest, confined largely to a few bilateral interconnections rather than the integrated multilateral system imagined by planners.

The reasons are well known. ASEAN is profoundly heterogeneous — economically, politically and institutionally. Electricity markets range from vertically integrated state monopolies to partially liberalised systems. Pricing regimes differ wildly. Legal frameworks, regulatory capacity and risk tolerance vary enormously. Financing large, cross-border infrastructure in such an environment is notoriously difficult. Operation and maintenance across jurisdictions multiply complexity. These challenges are laid out clearly in ASEAN energy planning documents and presentations stretching back over a decade

Yet the ASEAN paper treats grid integration as a technical optimisation problem, not a political-economic one. It assumes away the very frictions that have stalled the APG for decades. Models can wish these frictions out of existence; reality cannot.

Batteries, Hydrogen and the Alchemy of Costless Storage

Grid-scale battery storage appears in the paper as a solution to intermittency, but without any serious assessment of scale or cost. The prohibitive material and capital requirements of battery systems capable of backing up national grids for days or weeks are well documented. Even heroic assumptions about cost declines do not alter the arithmetic: power storage at scale is ruinously expensive.

Hydrogen fares no better. ‘Green hydrogen’, produced via electrolysis using renewable electricity, is treated as a flexible energy carrier for power generation, industry and storage. In reality, it remains a monument to inefficiency. Converting electricity to hydrogen and back again squanders energy at every step. Costs remain multiples of natural gas even under optimistic assumptions. Infrastructure requirements — from specialised pipelines to storage — are vast and largely non-existent. The global hydrogen economy remains, at best, a collection of pilot projects and hyped-up press releases.

The paper’s treatment of hydrogen echoes the same magical thinking of the ‘new energy economy’ that has plagued international energy modelling for years: technologies at demonstration scale are assumed to mature, scale and cheapen precisely when needed, without evidence or precedent.

CCS: The Highest Hype-to-Reality Ratio in Energy Policy

If renewables and hydrogen are fantasies of abundance, carbon capture and storage is the fantasy of absolution: a promise that fossil fuels can continue without consequence. The ASEAN paper leans heavily on carbon capture and storage (CCS) in its alternative pathway yet offers no serious discussion of its dismal real-world record.

After decades of effort and billions in subsidies, CCS accounts for a vanishingly small fraction of global emissions. Many flagship projects have failed outright; others operate only with massive public support, often serving enhanced oil recovery rather than climate mitigation. Even its advocates concede that CCS suffers from high capital costs, severe energy penalties, legal liability uncertainties and chronic underperformance.

Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, observed wryly in 2021 that the number of academic papers written on CCS divided by real-life implementation of it yields “the highest ratio in the history of science”. Thus, Britain’s own quixotic CCS crusade — lavishing tens of billions on technologies that have failed repeatedly — stands as a cautionary tale, not a model to emulate.

To propose CCS as a cornerstone of ASEAN’s energy future is not realism; it is cargo-cult policy, importing the rhetoric of Western climate ambition without its painful lessons.

The IEA Precedent: Advocacy Disguised as Analysis

The intellectual lineage of the ASEAN paper is unmistakable. Its structure, assumptions and optimism mirror those of the International Energy Agency’s ‘Net Zero by 2050’ roadmap — a document that has since been subjected to devastating critique. That roadmap rested on implausible assumptions about technology costs, energy efficiency gains, behavioural change and global coordination. It assumed away geopolitics, development priorities and economic trade-offs. It transformed the IEA from a guardian of energy security into a cheerleader for climate advocacy.

The same critique applies here. Like the IEA roadmap, the ASEAN paper constructs an internally coherent model detached from political economy, cost realism and historical experience. It is not that ASEAN cannot imagine Net Zero in spreadsheets; it is that societies do not run on spreadsheets.

Stockholm Syndrome in Southeast Asia?

Why, then, do ASEAN scholars and politicians persist in this line of thinking as Europe retreats and America revolts? The answer may lie in a peculiar form of the Stockholm syndrome. Having been lectured, cajoled and incentivised by Western political leaders and institutions for decades, elites in developing countries internalise climate narratives long after their authors such as Bill Gates begin to abandon them. The moral authority of the ‘Church of Climate’ lingers even as its economic foundations crumble in the West. ASEAN risks mistaking virtue-signalling for strategy, modelling elegance for development policy.

For example, Dr Tan See Leng, Singapore’s Minister-in-charge of Energy and Science and Technology, said last year that “It is no longer feasible or practical for Singapore to avoid working towards a Net Zero future”. The Minister also said that fluctuations in the prices of fossil fuels due to geopolitical conflicts have driven up energy prices and dealing with the impacts of climate change, such as rising sea levels, is critical for Singapore. Along similar lines, Ed Miliband, UK’s Energy Secretary, told the House of Commons in 2024 that issuing licences for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea “will ensure the UK remain at the mercy of petrostates and dictators who control fossil fuel markets and is entirely incompatible with the UK’s international climate change commitments”.

But lately, geopolitical events and ample oil and gas supplies have seen energy prices trending downwards since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. MPs in the British Parliament were told by energy company CEOs in October that even if international natural gas prices halved, Net Zero levies and mandates would drive up household electricity bills. As for Singapore’s concerns about rising sea levels (which no evidence shows are accelerating), the prudent response would be to adapt to it with dykes and sea-walls, as the Netherlands has done for over two centuries.

Economic Suicide by Spreadsheet

The ASEAN Net Zero paper ignores the central lesson of modern history: abundant, affordable and reliable energy is not a luxury. It is the precondition of development. ASEAN’s extraordinary growth over the past half-century was powered by fossil fuels, not despite them. To abandon that foundation on the basis of Western climate dogma — just as the West itself begins to recoil from the consequences — would indeed be an act of economic self-harm.

Net Zero by 2050 may exist in models. It is not tenable in the real world. And policy built on that confusion risks condemning Southeast Asia to slower growth, higher costs and diminished prospects — all in service of a creed whose high priests are already losing the faith.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/01/16/southeast-asia-continues-hurtling-down-the-net-zero-suicide-track/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.