Nathaniel Bullard is a climate change researcher and author at Bloomberg Green. He has put together this 141 slide presentation that is intended to capture the state of the climate and decarbonisation and is an absolutely fascinating snapshot of the climate transition.
It starts with some bad news, temperatures have already risen 1 degree Celsius above their long term average. Climate change isn’t a future threat, it is a current reality. And as a result the earth is drier, as surface humidity has dropped by more than 1% this century. That is the bad news.
But there is good news too. GDP is slowly decoupling from oil, indicating that the world economy is (slowly) weening itself off it. And the growth curve for renewables is starting to look exponential – 1% of global power generation in 1990, 2% in 2005 and now more than 13%.
CO2 emissions per capita have peaked. In the mid-2000’s they reached 4.91 tonnes per person. That number is now down to 4.47 tonnes (the challenge is – the world’s population has grown in that time).
With estimates that $194 trillion needs to be invested between today and 2050 to achieve net zero, this will be the biggest collective human undertaking of our lifetime. The good news is that the early investments do appear to have yielded some change. Now we just have to supercharge it.
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