Tag Archives: livable future

The Second Most Important Chart in the New IEA Report

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This is probably the most important chart in the new IEA report, Net Zero by 2050:

It answers the question I asked when I first read about the report in today’s New York Times: what happens without the “unprecedented” global cooperation the report calls for?

In that likely scenario, the IEA does not see the world arriving at Net Zero emissions until around 2090 — which means we will have missed important targets (including limiting average global temperature rise to 1.5° Celsius warming). It also means a much less livable human future.

The second most important chart, to my mind, is this one, predicting  growth in demand for critical minerals such as copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth elements.

The report breaks it down further:

In a short Twitter thread I wrote this morning, I offered this guess:

 

Hope Yet? A Survey on the Livable Human Future

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I just conducted a completely unscientific survey on Twitter, asking whether we human beings have a livable future here on earth. The polling lasted twenty-four hours. Sixty-two people weighed in.

Here are the results, for your consideration.

The results were undoubtedly skewed by the way I worded the question and by the kind of people who follow me on Twitter and who are drawn to these issues. I’d put the question this way in an earlier exchange about the livable human future with Professor Sarah Lilly Heidt, and when creating the survey I didn’t fuss over it too much. I really just wanted to get a rough sense of the mood out there, and I figured the three choices (no hope, we’ll manage, and we will thrive) would do the trick.

Of course, if I could do the whole thing over — which I would love to do, on a much grander scale — I wouldn’t frame the issue in terms of despair, and I would like to drill down a little further to get at attitudes behind the answers.