It’s great to celebrate the COP21 agreement in Paris as an unprecedented cooperation between nations. However, the truly hard work is yet to be done.
In order to keep our global temperature rise to below 2C, we must face reality and work incredibly hard. To meet current demand for energy, we have to deploy 1 gigawatt of carbon-free power EVERY SINGLE DAY for the next one hundred years.
That’s equivalent to opening 1 large nuclear power plant every single day.
Or putting up 1500 wind turbines every single day.
And that doesn’t even start to tackle the transportation sector: we still have to quickly figure out how to change all transportation, including cars, ships, trucks, airplanes, and mining processes, as well as steel and cement production from fossil fuels to non-carbon.
Every single day that we do not do this, we fall further behind. EVERY SINGLE DAY. We don’t have time to panic, although what you should be feeling right now is panic. We must get to work.
Image by Roger Pielke Jr. using BP statistical data.
Recent Comments