Ams Climate Change Audio - Environmental Science Seminar Series (esss)

Does the current framing and scaling of the climate/energy issue adequately capture the challenge posed? If not, what might be a more appropriate frame and scale? The Union of Energy and Climate The issues of global energy demand and climate response are, at one level, complex and contentious. However, they are linked by simple but compelling considerations. First, we know that energy demand is driven by the product of population, per capita yearly income, and the amount of energy required for each dollar of economic production. The product of these three quantities sets the rate of current (2007) world energy consumption at approximately 0.5 billion trillion joules of energy each year. With the projected increase in population and average per capita income, this number will reach approximately 1.5 billion trillion joules each year by 2050. That increase is equivalent to the construction of 1000 large coal burning power plants per year for the next four decades. The scale, the size, of this increased de