Energy, Demography, and Climate: Is There an Alternative to Abandoning Fossil Fuels?

Abstract

Alternative scenarios for the development of world energy, based on low options for the change in the population of the planet, are being explored from the point of view of preventing dangerous global climate change. It has been shown that in order to keep the increase in the average global temperature within safe limits while maintaining the current growth rates of energy consumption and the population of the planet, a radical restructuring of the world energy industry is necessary—the “great energy transition”—with a complete rejection of the use of fossil fuels in the coming decades, which seems impossible given the inertia of development and spread of energy technologies. Using the author’s approaches to forecasting the volume and structure of world energy consumption, alternative scenarios for carbon dioxide emissions have been formed in the implementation of low, but quite realistic trends for demographic dynamics. Based on simulations of models of the global carbon cycle and climate, it is shown that the development of natural demographic processes is able to restrain growth and ensure a further decrease in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, limiting the increase in the average global temperature to a completely safe level of 1.8 degrees compared to the pre-industrial period without large-scale restructuring of the world energy.