The World in 2030

168 The World in 2030
Nations go to war to secure their long-term supplies of
energy and in 2007 alarm bells have started to sound in
many countries because projections suggest that the world
is going to demand much more energy between now and
2030. And in that timeframe global oil reserves will start to
run out.
Estimates for future energy consumption vary widely, but
at a minimum it is suggested that world energy consumption
will increase by 50 per cent 320 by 2030 and the maximum
projected increase is put at 100 per cent. 321 These nice round
figures indicate just how ‘approximate’ some of the future
projections necessarily are but they also illustrate a grave
problem; in an era in which we have to cut our carbon
emissions by at least 40 per cent by 2030 (and at the very
least 60 per cent by 2050), how are we going to find sufficient
energy of the right kind to meet our enlarged needs?
Ray Kurzweil, ever the optimist, sees a radical solution to
the looming energy crisis coming from technology:
By 2030 the price-performance of computation and
communication will increase by a factor of ten to
one hundred million compared to today. Other
technologies will also undergo enormous increases
in capacity and efficiency. Energy requirements will
grow far more slowly than the capacity of technologies,
however, because of greatly increased efficiencies
in the use of energy. A primary implication
of the nanotechnology revolution is that physical
technologies, such as manufacturing and energy,
will become governed by the law of accelerating