Planetary Boundaries - Case of Energy

Invention of steam engine in 1776 would be great contributor of economic progress. Fossil fuels drives the progress of industries, it brought them into energetic and efficient. We know fossil fuels should be replaced to keep our environmental aspect safer level, but we are not still free from fossil fuels even we have several options like renewable energy. Thus, energy efficiency is what we must deal with for pushing sustainable development. Because amount of energy consumption reflects the amount of productivity over the world. We cannot stop to use the energy. Even efficiently using energy resources are likely to be contributor of economic growth, we have not been able to do it. Therefore, we should contemplate why human beings has not been available to replace dirty energy into cleaner one. Here is interesting consideration. Domestic product per capita is in proportion to Energy consumption. The graph of the GDP per capita of an economy versus its energy consumption is close to a straight line, signifying that a doubling of the size of an economy tends to be associated with a doubling of primary energy use. On average, for every $1,000 of total production in the economy, the economy use tends to be 0.19tons of oil equivalent. (Sachs, 2015). From this observation, we “can” say the countries needs to consume energy source if they hope to keep and grow their economic force and scale. So, how should we do break through this circumstance, to be free from chronically carbonized cycle? There are three suggestion to deeply decarbonize. First, to pursue energy efficiency is to decline the energy per unit of GDP. Energy consumption of developed countries are going down if it can be achieved. Second, low carbon electricity including wind, solar, nuclear and so on should be adopted in order to decrease CO2 emission per megawatt. Third is to shift the technology from burning fossil oil to cleaner energy sources.