Why and how: Push and pull factors
Urgency: Planetary Boundaries
Planetary boundaries define a safe operating space for life on earth, based on the earth’s ability to absorb human impact. Breaking the boundary results in changing those operating spaces irreversibely.
- 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries have been crossed.
- fossil fuels contribute to 75% of all global emitted greenhouse gases.
Energy Carbon Nexus
It a triangular dependency trying to reduce one of the corners results in increase of demand for the other. Example:
- depletion of materials means that more energy has to be used for extraction.
- reducing the carbon intensity means that more materials are needed for the infrastructure needed to produce the energy (wind farm, solar cells etc)