Over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons.
For people in poor countries, it's less than one ton.
It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet.
And somehow we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero.
It's been constantly going up.
It's only various economic changes that have even flattened at all.
So we have to go from rapidly rising to falling and falling all the way to zero.
This equation has four factors.
A little bit of multiplication.
So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero.
And that's going to be based on the number of people.
the services each person is using on average,
the energy on average for each service,
and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy.
So let's look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero.
Probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero.
back from high school algebra. But let's take a look.
First we've got population. Now the world today has 6.8 billion people.
That's headed up to about 9 billion.
Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services,
we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.
But there we see an increase of about 1.3.
The second factor is the services we use.
This encompasses everything.
The food we eat, clothing, TV, heating.
These are very good things.
Getting rid of poverty means providing these services
to almost everyone on the planet.
And it's a great thing for this number to go up.
In the rich world, perhaps the top 1 billion, we probably could cut back and use less.
But every year, this number on average is going to go up.
So this is a wish. It's a very concrete wish that we invent this technology.
If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years, I can pick who's president,
I can pick a vaccine, which is something I love,
or I could pick that this thing that's half the cost with no CO2 gets invented.
This is the wish I would pick.
This is the one with the greatest impact.
If we don't get this wish,
the division between the people
who think short-term and long-term will be terrible,
between the U.S. and China,
between poor countries and rich,
and most of all, the lives of those 2 billion will be far worse.