Carbon future maths6 Sep 2020 20:56
The United Nations forecast the world population at the very least will increase 50% from 2019 levels by 2100. If there were no interventions by technology the 2019 oil usage of nearly 100 M barrels a day would be up to 150 million barrels a day and the world be as a hot as anything. Fortunately technology interventions are happening. The innovations that exist today will bring that long term usage down to 105M barrels a day. Indeed all the renewable effort so far has been levelled out by population growth and has kept oil demand growth to around 1% a year that otherwise would be far higher. Future technology may arise to substitute plastics in some areas we might have electric airplanes, we might have electric motors running ships, we might find ways to avoid medical implants with tissue engineering or whatever. This might bring us down to 40-50M barrels a day, but a lot of oil field exhaustion would also coincide with it. The key inventions will be CO2 and methane absorption devices. I wonder if a lake somewhere will be coated with special bacteria as a big absorption pool or they coat areas of the ocean to pull it in and feed fish at the same time. It may well be crazy ideas like this that change the environment in a positive way and help moderate climate changes. The only way to stop oil growth is having little population growth. Organisations like extinction rebellion need to answer that problem as making new people creates all the challenges that have to be resolved.