Distopia

Today was the first day of our energy efficiency conference, and Nathan Lewis, a chemistry professor at Caltech, gave the keynote. He is an extremely charismatic speaker and an obviously intelligent man. His talk was very depressing. It was much like watching An Inconvenient Truth, except more scientific. He had a few main points that I've remembered in the hour and a half since the talk ended:
1. There is enough non-renewable fuel to provide 3,000 years' worth of energy
2. But that fuel will dump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere if we use it

3. CO2 is a stable molecule--it doesn't react with oxygen on its own--so it doesn't really break down on its own, ever. It needs a catalyst, like something they use in photosynthesis.
4. There's a lot of energy coming to the earth from the sun
5. But the only way to store it in a way that will scale to the entire world economy is in chemical bonds, i.e. in fuels. Not batteries.

6. If we don't start building solar cells soon, then we (by we he means the world) will build coal and gas plants, because that is "business as usual," and those have a lifetime of 40 years

7. By 2050 we will have dumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere that scientists predict bad shit might go down (or something--I'm not too clear on this part, and I don't think anyone really is) unless we stop emitting now

8. So we better stop emitting CO2 now, guys.

Then Walter Kohn (nobel laureate and creator of the much-despised DFT) suggested that maybe we should try to reduce the world's population. Nathan Lewis replied that that's not very practical; plus, if we were to do that, we'd have to get rid of mostly Americans. Then he answer a question about methane and the meeting was dimissed.