> Population is peaking soon which should be a good start for flattening that curve.
It might help but most of the world is still considered "in development", we need for that development to happen with sustainable energy sources, and for that it needs to be as simple and cheap to be harvested and used as it is for those countries to use fossil fuels today.
If that doesn't happen then these countries will use fossil fuels to develop, and the population peaking won't be of much help when those countries start emitting more per capita like many developed countries.
Yes, it's important that the development of large groups of people who don't emit much at all, leapfrog directly to more modern energy.
I think it's safe to say there is a large risk that a billion people in india will still use fossil fuel for a large part of their development. Their first cars will be internal combustion and so on. They'll use that increased wealth to eat more meat than they did before and so on. I'm not optimistic about our chances to change any of that.
I think there's signs of that happening already, as well as precedent. A lot of developing countries just kind of skipped ahead to modern internet infrastructure, for example, and solar is booming in India, especially, at the moment.
If the developing world develops, there will be less exploitable cheap labor, so everyone in already developed countries will have to start consuming less when their wages aren’t so disproportionally high compared to where their iPhone gets made.
It might help but most of the world is still considered "in development", we need for that development to happen with sustainable energy sources, and for that it needs to be as simple and cheap to be harvested and used as it is for those countries to use fossil fuels today.
If that doesn't happen then these countries will use fossil fuels to develop, and the population peaking won't be of much help when those countries start emitting more per capita like many developed countries.