The oil and gas industry, which includes many of the most profitable and powerful businesses in the world, is directly and indirectly responsible for more than 40% of carbon emissions—impacting the lives of billions of people, many living in the world's most remote and low-resourced communities.
A new study proposes aggressive energy policies that would enable immediate and substantive decreases to carbon emissions and recommends a heightened level of government, corporate and citizen action to accelerate the decarbonization of the global economy, aiming to minimize the number of projected human deaths.
"Such mass death is clearly unacceptable. It's pretty scary really, especially for our children," said Pearce, Western's John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and lead author of the study."When climate scientists run their models and then report on them, everybody leans toward being conservative, because no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom. We've done that here too and it still doesn't look good.