Climate change comes because we're emitting lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and it causes the earth to heat up. We need to get our carbon emissions down.
So I think of it mathematically. We start with the number of people each of us is using services that require energy, like heating or air-conditioning, transport.
And so we have how much energy each of those services use. And then we have how much carbon comes out for each unit of energy.
So once you multiply those together, that's where you get about 36 billion tons of CO2 being emitted. To make that come out to a number about zero, how are we going to change the four factors?
The first one, population. That's going up.
We're going to get to over a nine billion this century. On services per person?
Yes rich countries can use a bit less. But because places like India and Africa who still don't have air conditioning and refrigeration, actually we want this number to go up.
We want people to have modern lifestyles and so the total services will increase. Now this next factor, the energy used per service, their innovation is gonna help.
We'll get this down but only by about a factor of two or so. And so that leaves our final factor, CO2 per unit of energy.
That's where we're going to have to do something super dramatic. We're going to have to use sources of energy that emit no carbon dioxide to get from 36 billion over here down to a very very small number and avoid catastrophic climate change.
