10bn people times 1stWorld high energy use? The Earth says no.
The Earth can say whatever it wants, the emerging economies say "bring it on". They all want 1st world energy too. I can't blame them, I just want them to lead with clean energy.
The biggest misnomer here is that renewables are the only clean energy. A large part, yes, but only? No.
You need to go back and revisit why we stopped using wind and water in the first place. The biggest issues were portability and always on.
Those issues have not changed. Coal, steam, oil and the ICE, stopped wind and water use as a power source.
Batteries are a critical part of the fix. They provide portability and help fix the always on.
If you cannot, or will not, understand that, then you are doomed to failure in your goals.
1 year ago I would not have believed how fast the 1st world would move on this. In 2018, UK net CO2 emissions fell by 2.4%. The US rose by 2.5%, China by 4.5% and India by 6.3%.
Looking at the 2017 figures by % of 1990 emissions is very interesting.
Greenland, 17,266%. What, you say, madness. Actually, no, 3,000 tons in 1990 and half a million in 2017.
Vietnam, 1083%, up to 218mt, Myanmar, 646% up to 28mt. Bangladesh, 609%, up to 84mt, China, 453% to 10,000mt and the largest emitter in the world. India, 405%, Indonesia 315%,
Then let us look at the first world.
US, 100.4% France, 87.6%, Germany, 78.2%, United Kingdom, 64. 4%,
Going further I took an arbitrary, established/emerging economy split on the emissions. I included India and China in the emerging. All EU countries in established, all western 1st world and a few others like Russia.
The split was interesting. 15,970mt for the established economies. 19,885 for the emerging. Excluding air and shipping as they are not broken down by country.
The bigger message is the % of 1990 emissions in 2017. For the first group (excluding Greenland for obvious reasons), has a mean % of 135 of 1990 emissions.
Doing the same thing to the emerging markets, removing some very small and greatly outlying %'s, the median % of 1990 is 1033%.
We are already there. The emerging markets have not only caught up with the 1st world, they have overtaken it, are growing as the 1st world shrinks and are now the drivers of the growth in CO2 that we see today.
This makes the delivery of a viable portable clean energy infrastructure, via batteries or hydrogen or even cryo air, vitally important. Because the current driver for the CO2 growth we are experiencing (we are about to hit the first decade with CO2ppm growth over 2ppm for every year), is not being driven by the 1st world. It is being driven by the emerging world and far from saying "NO", they are saying GIMME GIMME GIMME and DAMN THE COST.
Figures taken form the wiki page on
countries by CO2 emissions