I have long believed that we will not "save the planet" solely by replacing light bulbs and driving a Prius.  In November 2015, about a month before the Paris COP21 meeting, I attended a conference at Columbia University in which Prof. Jeffrey Sachs spoke on the implications of the carbon budget proposed by the IPCC.  The carbon budget[i] is the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide that can be released into the Earth's atmosphere while plausibly maintaining global warming below the 2°C limit.  The climate community estimates the carbon budget at approximately one trillion tons.  It further estimates that we have already spent half of that and at the present course and speed we will spend the remainder by 2050.  In his talks Prof. Sachs discusses the challenge of ensuring that, if we wish to limit ourselves to this budget, substantial fractions - up to 80% - of the remaining reserves of coal, oil, and gas will have to remain in the ground[ii], [iii], [iv].  The alternatives would be massive deployment in the next thirty to forty years of Carbon Capture and Sequestration, which has so far proved disappointing, or of Geo-engineering, which is totally unproven and appears risky.  Even at today's depressed prices for coal, oil, and gas, that means abandoning unrealised assets worth some tens of trillions of USD.  It is of course highly improbable that the companies and stockholders - indeed anyone - owning these stranded assets would simply walk away from them, even for such a good cause. So how are we to square this particular circle?

So the question we face in the coming decades is: What circumstances could lead to a switch from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy as the primary basis of the global economy? In this proposal I am asking: What are the possible trajectories to its completion within the short time available to us?  Indeed, it would useful to whether at least one such trajectory exists. 

The Paris COP21 meeting was viewed as successful in getting governments to commit to the goal of limiting climate change to the 2°C.  While that gave us a warm, fuzzy feeling, it is also acknowledged that the pledges they made on reductions in greenhouse gas emissions fall well short of what is required.  The climate change community has long sought to achieve this goal by motivating governments to wave their magic wands.  But after observing more than twenty years of dithering by governments, I am inclined to think that a) it may too late for carbon taxes or carbon credits to solve this problem (by themselves) and b) it is actually beyond the power of governments to solve it.  The industry based on fossil fuels is a global energy system in which fuel is extracted in one part of the world, consumed in another part to manufacture products that are then consumed in other parts of the world.  This global energy system is intimately connected to the global economic system, which was estimated in 2014 to be worth about USD 78 trillion[v].  In a given year even the largest governments can have only marginal impact on these systems.

But what if some combination of social behaviour, political initiative, and technological development could influence this global system to achieve these goals and leave all of these stranded assets in the ground?  Or perhaps more crucially, what if no combination were able to do this?  Could  a group of people knowledgeable about energy, social behaviours, national and global economics, politics, and technology search the space of possible pathways and determine a) whether one or more such pathways exist and b) how we collectively adopt one or more of them?

It is high time that we began to explore how we can achieve this goal of not burning large fractions of Earth's remaining fossil fuels. 

My proposal is to apply and extend the work on Global Systems Science begun under FP7 and continuing under Horizons 2020 to understand whether and how the global systems of energy, social behaviours, national and global economics, politics, and technology may align to enable this vital goal to be achieved.  I suggest approaching this from the mid-century backwards and running systems models backwards to see how they intersect current forward projections of changes in our energy consumption and consumption.

For example, we can posit an estimate of global energy consumption based on projections of demographics, economics, and changes in how energy is consumed, and from there what mix of renewable and remaining non-renewable sources will be required.  Those changes in how energy is consumed and produced will require changes in personal and industrial infrastructure.  How quickly must those be implemented?  If will require significant changes in global economies and financial models, how quickly and under what circumstances will these occur.

The core research challenges here are to develop models of the engineering and financial behaviours of the global fossil fuels industry in the contexts of global demographics, economics, finance, national social and political behaviours, and alternative energy supplies.  Each of these domains has its approaches to modeling that will demand technical innovation to enable their integration.

While this is a mammoth modeling task, akin in complexity to that of climate studies, but lacking their hard science foundations, the greater challenge may lie in effectively uniting the thinking of even more varied disciplines and professions.  Like the climate studies, this may eventually need to be a global research initiative, but Europe may be the best place to begin.  I have seen this attempted in the Global Systems Science initiative and in others, such as the Rockefeller Foundations early exploration of a science of cities, so I am aware of the difficulties that this poses.  Yet, just as the world has needed the global climate studies in order to frame our future risks, I believe that the world also needs this collaboration to determine whether and how we can achieve the desired transition.  It will severely test our skills of facilitation, coordination and integration, but if such trajectories exists, we can give leaders in the public, civic, and private sectors real roadmaps to the goal instead of incremental changes that may or may not achieve anything.

This one question: "What circumstances could lead by mid-century to a switch from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy as the primary basis of the global economy?" is the defining question of our age.  With DG CONNECT's programme on Global Systems Science we have begun to learn how to tackle such global systems problems and we now have a concrete and important challenge to which to apply that learning.

[i] Unburnable Carbon 2013, The Carbon Tracker, [Online].  Available 24 January 2016: http://www.carbontracker.org/report/wasted-capital-and-stranded-assets/

[ii] Carey, M., Breaking the Tragedy of the Horizon, Bank of England, [Online].  Available 24 January 2016:  http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2015/spee...

[iii] Unburnable Carbon, The Carbon Tracker, [Online].  Available 25January 2016: http://www.carbontracker.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Unburnable-Carbo...

[iv] Stranded Carbon Assets, The Generation Foundation, 30 October 2013 [Online].  Available 25 January 2016: https://www.genfound.org/media/pdf-generation-foundation-stranded-carbon...

[v] GDP at market prices, World Bank [Online).  Available 3 February 2016: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD