Rethinking our world to reach zero.
Image: Nasa
We have this big problem
Currently, we are putting 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. To put that into perspective back just 150 years ago, we were producing less than 1 billion tonnes. And now we need to reduce that to zero by 2050 or we’ll be looking at consequences far, far worse than Covid-19 has brought to our planet.
Where’s all this Greenhouse gas coming from?
And the answer is... Us. We’ve created an incredible world for ourselves, we’ve doubled our life expectancy since the 1900s, we can circumvent our world within 40 hours and survive the harshest conditions. However, a number of the decisions we made along the way about how we create this world for ourselves didn’t fully appreciate the effect we’d have on our planet itself.
To get more specific, you can break down these 51 billion tonnes emitted each year into the following areas:
Rhodium Group & Breakthrough Energy
There is one really important caveat I should mention at this stage, the greenhouse gases that are emitted into the atmosphere don’t come from all 7.6Bn of us equally. Sadly it is the richest 10% (earning over £63,000 p/a) who are responsible for around 50% of greenhouse gas emissions and the poorest 50% is responsible for just 10% of them*. To make matters worse the people who will be affected most by climate change are the poorest 50 %, we’ll go more into this in a later article.
What do we need to do to get to zero?
Good question; in short by rethinking the way our world works. Quite a lot of these changes we won’t even notice, others we will and they’ll be transformative. This process of taking us to zero is our opportunity to create a world far more beautiful and prosperous than anything we have currently.
The solutions to getting to zero are many, some will require deep research and innovation, others just a huge amount of passion and perseverance to get them out there. They will need support from you the public, academia, the government in the form of policy and the financial markets in the form of patient investment funds.
And that’s where we come in
The Rethink Collective will focus on how we can move quickly on getting from 51 to 0. We’ll contribute by providing a platform for simple, straightforward research and insights, we’ll showcase the best innovation as well as some really old innovations that we just need to do more of.
We’ll be taking a top-down approach, looking at the macro challenge we face and identifying the following:
The carbon footprint we can effect
Whether the technology is there to drive change
The size of the market to go after
The current start-ups and scale-ups out there already
How we can help accelerate progress
We’ll also be proposing some radical approaches and telling you the real story every step of the way.
First up we’re going to be looking at carbon credits and offsetting. We’ll be discussing how it works, whether it’s helpful and how we should be approaching it.
To get the latest insights from the Rethink Collective sign up here. If you’d like to contribute to a topic then you can reach out at luke@rethinkcollective.org.
*https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-richest-1-percent-more-double-emissions-poorest-half-humanity#:~:text=Annual%20emissions%20grew%20by%2060,of%20the%20poorest%2050%20percent.
