Seen here speaking at TED2010, Bill Gates addresses carbon emission reduction in a pragmatic and concise speech, breaking it down like this:
CO2 = P x S x E x C
Where P is the number of people, S is the number of services per person, E is the amount of energy for each service, and C is the amount of carbon emitted to produce that energy.
He makes some valid points that tie very closely to my essential argument that changing our energy model is critical to our future. The population is currently 6.8 billion, projected to reach 9 billion by 2050. P must continue to increase, so some of these other factors need to decrease. Services per person is increasing which is a positive thing for the developing world. That's not a number we would want to decrease. Now we have a lot of pressure placed on two factors: energy efficiency and energy production. Energy efficiency is improving but some new services on the horizon may require more energy than we can fathom. For example, the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, is estimated to consume 1000 Gigawatt hours of electricity in a single year, "enough to power the City of Geneva twice over"*
That leaves C, that last variable that we could have any hope of significantly reducing. And let's not forget that carbon emissions aside, we're going to need a whole lot of energy to support all those other variables that just keep going up. Bill Gates goes on to discuss some of the various alternatives and their challenges briefly, but I think his focus on this equation is the strongest part of his presentation.
Let's hand it to Bill, he really set this one up pretty well to use as a base concept. If you wanted to leave carbon out of this altogether, you could re-write the equation thus:
E = P x S x EF
Where E is the total amount of energy required to power the globe, P is the population, S is the number of services per person, and EF is the average energy efficiency of each service. With our population projected to reach 9 billion by 2050, that's a lot of E. And I don't mean the kind you remember from your 90s raver phase.
It is clear to me that the renewable energy and energy efficiency markets are going to experience a dramatic rise in fortunes over the next 10-15 years, the alternative being almost unthinkable. It's getting close to crunch time and innovators are like college freshmen cramming all night before the big exam because they were out partying and inventing Viagara and Segways.
* http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/embedded-systems/powering-the-large-hadron-collider
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