[Music] I'm Andrew Jones of climate interactive and I'll show you n roads the global simulator that we built with MIT Sloan it helps people see how actions such as say a carbon price affects outcomes such as temperature on the left is the main graph that shows from 2000 out to 2100 various sources of energy I'll reset here you can see coal you see oil natural gas and blue renewables bioenergy nuclear and a new technology on the right is temperature change from 2000 out to 2100 with the final 2100 temperature in celcius and in Fahrenheit at the bottom are sliders not just carbon price but many other actions that can be tested such as energy efficiency in transform energy efficiency in buildings in industry taxing coal imagining a new technology growing more trees cutting deforestation electrifying cutting methane and other actions such as carbon removal you click the buttons and thousands of equations in a system dynamics model calculate the impact our team at climate interactive and MIT Sloan built n roads using the best available science on climate energy economics land-use and agriculture with data from the IEA the United Nations the EIA and the IPCC and we compare our results against the larger disaggregated integrated assessment models such as those in the energy modelling forum and the SSPs the purpose of the n road simulator is to support and frame better conversations about how to address climate change we embed the simulator in a workshop in a game called the climate action simulation and student exercises all that are available at climate interactive org n Rose works in two modes in the first mode is designed for a business person a policymaker a community member of climate leader student can test various solutions to climate and quickly see the outcome in the long term in the second an advanced user may want to set a more specific carbon price say exactly say 75 dollars a ton phasing in over a certain amount of time they also may want to see many of the assumptions in the model underneath it so on the other interesting features in a model include in the advanced view the information button where one can see examples of this policy the big message some of the key dynamics co-benefits equity considerations and the slider settings one can also dig even more deeply into the overall user guide and the 400 page reference guide for the model one can also replay the last change the button here undoes the action or redoes the action so one can see what is the relative impact or you can do it as a movie by hitting replay last change and then letting the simulation automatically play out one of the more interesting views that one can view is the kaya graphs it shows population consumption energy intensity of GDP carbon intensity of energy all being multiplied together to give you co2 emissions from energy shows some of the other assumptions regarding the drivers of growth in an interesting way the home button resets all the graphs and bring you back here after you make a scenario that you like say you're able to get all these things to change and you can get all the way down to below two degrees or 1.5 and you like that scenario you hit the button and you can copy your scenario and send it to somebody else to share your vision for addressing climate hit this button and all the ciders sliders reset at this point temperature is the graph on the right we often find it helpful instead just show greenhouse gas net emissions when that is changed one can see greenhouse gas net emissions graph changes a good bit more and one can see more of the impacts than just by changing by looking at the temperature graph even more advanced users may want to see the area graph which shows all of those actions stacked and shows many of the negative emissions below the zero line over on the right here speaking of the carbon removal and negative emissions can be helpful to see that underneath and the advanced view one can use detailed settings and individually set actions on carbon removal such as director capture bioenergy mineralization and see all of these actions one by one as they stack on top of each other many users also appreciate changing assumptions in the model many of the important assumptions in the climate sector for examples such as a sensitivity to the doubling and carbon can be changed here many of the other assumptions are available for changing as well many of the fossil fuel levers have not just a tax setting or subsidies setting but one can also formally and fully restrict investment in new infrastructure in some year says stop building new coal infrastructure in 2025 2045 also one can reduce utilization of coal or other also fuels in any year one can turn on settings such as plane sounds so when things get better you hear a happy noise and worse a sad noise one can also see a review of all the actions and the outcomes here in actions and outcomes view with a list of all the actions that you've taken and then your results over here on the bottom let's look at the business-as-usual scenario here in n roads think of it as a plausible scenario that is the starting point for your experimentation in the simulator it's not our forecast of where we think things will be headed in this scenario temperature rises from 2000 out to 2100 here we are around somewhere in 2020 around 1.4 degrees C passing 1.5 out here passing two degrees all the way up to about 4.1 in 2100 why is that happening well the main reason is because greenhouse gas net emissions are going up and up and up this is the emissions of from coal oil and gas but also methane nitrous oxide F gases why is that happening the main drivers can be seen under here under Kyah graphs let's look carefully at these here's population here it is at seven point seven billion or so today heading up in this middle UN projection to about eleven billion the second big driver is consumption of goods and services GDP per person around the world growing and growing over time multiply these two numbers together and you get overall GDP and there's the energy intensity of GDP that is how much energy does it take to deliver a trillion dollars of value it's coming down as we shift from manufacturing towards service industry and as technologies from the manufacturing and motors and cars and lighting and HVAC systems and everything gets more efficient and we design more efficient transportation systems gets more and more efficient that is it takes less energy to deliver money deliver value over time multiply all three of these together and you get total energy use on earth in exajoules per year the carbon intensity of energy is how much I mean megatons of carbon dioxide get emitted per unit energy that is does it come from coal oil gas renewables nuclear and that will dictate the energy excuse me the carbon intensity of the energy supply multiply all four together and that gives you this last number which is carbon emissions from energy so in this world you can see that it's going up why is it going up it's because the growth back here is stronger than the reductions in these second two factors so on net we have more and more emissions from energy add in the carbon dioxide from land use and the other gases and you get four point one degrees now you can see the other interesting graphs that can show you those other gases here in this graph greenhouse gas and net emissions by gas I just show you the kya drivers here of energy co2 that's the black area and of course things are stacked on top of each other underneath that area is land use co2 from deforestation and then on top of it is the F gas is like HFCS and FS s6 on top of that this big blue swath is carbon excuse me methane ch4 and then nitrous oxide mostly from fertilizer on top of it so this is these are the main drivers of this scenario and it's a plausible future that you can compare against some of the more specifics that within the system are the the behavior of various energy supplies here in brown you can see coal growing through the century it doesn't peak like some of the other ones because there's a lot of coal in the world an absent major intervention that's likely to have growth over the century in red is oil which starts to get more expensive as we run into supply limitations in the latter half of the century fossil gas or natural gas here is in blue and it starts to slow its growth because we run into some limits here wind and solar renewable energy in green bioenergy burn processing biomass trees here in pink nuclear from uranium here and then down here at zero is a new technology like thorium fission or nuclear fusion so here's the base run business as usual run against which you can do experiments and see what would happen if we change things I'd like to now introduce to you all of the various levers that you're able to change to do experiments in n roads to create a different future over here you can change coal in three ways you can tax it or subsidize it in some way but underneath be sure to look and see that there are other things that you can do you can stop building new infrastructure you can cut utilization you can also imagine carbon capture and storage as some of your possibilities you can do the same with oil as you can with coal and with natural gas you can do all of that as well you can also reduce or change the leakage rate from methane with bio energy of many of the same controls here with renewable energy you can make many of the same changes of taxing or subsidizing but you can't ban infrastructure in the same way you can however change the cost of storage to imagine what would be different if we had and breakthroughs in storage capacity similar controls are possible with nuclear with new technology you can just imagine that a new technology emerges or underneath you can pick what year that happens by using the detailed settings and setting a specific breakthrough year like 2028 with carbon price you can set a 1 value or you can have it climb over time with many controls that are underneath energy efficiency think of this as vehicles and transportation systems you can control these factors either just in general terms or by specifying an exact percent per year improvement rate to the energy intensity of new capital this is in transport similar controls are available energy efficiency in buildings and industry you can also electrify this just drives increases or decreases in overall electro you can imagine a lot more electrification or actually what if we get even less than we're seeing right now same with electrification of buildings and industry this is heating and HVAC systems driven by electricity as opposed to gas and oil and coal two assumptions here population which you can change within the range of the UN scenarios and economic growth which you can shift up and down you can actually explore that by region if you're interested in what's going on in different parts of the world per deforestation you're just driving the reduction in the emissions from that sector here five point seven percent per year with methane you can in other you can break it into two areas you can look at agriculture and waste emissions separate from energy and industry emissions of those other gases with F forestation you can grow trees change many of the factors went about how long it takes for such practices to diffuse around the world with carbon removal you can either just change everything together or you can look at them one by one where you use detailed settings and change specifically Beck's direct air capture mineralization AG soil carbon and biochar there are also of course many changes in the assumptions that you can change to explore some of the key parameters that we main assumptions for I'd like to give you some tips about how to use n rows in order to do experiments the main idea is this it's tempting to just move a slider and see what the result is it's very important that you don't do that it's important that you take the time to think before you move one of the sliders so say you're imagining that you're going to tax natural gas before you hit the button it's important to think what is gonna happen in the model in this case you could think well natural gas is gonna be more expensive this blue line of gas maybe it won't grow as fast and maybe it'll actually go down so you think that's what I think is gonna happen what's gonna happen over here well will won't have as much energy co2 because we're not burning gas and that temperature is gonna go down so think ideally write it down or tell somebody else what you think is going to happen make the change and then when you make the change it's good to use these buttons where I'm going to replay and then see did it actually happen and I see I was right the blue line went down look it's going down and over here on the right we have a small decrease in that black area and temperature goes down a little bit but then you should explore well what else is going on and see if there's surprises well I see the brown line going up we have more coal that's interesting in the Green Line for wind and solar there's some compensating that's going on take the time to think about what's going to happen and then take the time to notice what the surprises are because that's how you actually learn something new overall we hope that we can you can use n roads to do experiments to help you learn what is the impact of a policy such as that and then also what is the collective impact of a wide range of policies and actions around the world that might be successful at getting us much closer to our climate goals much lower temperature off into the future overall we hope that the simulator is embedded in games and workshops to help people think more clearly about how to address this challenge and have better conversations with others for more information go to climate interactive org that's climate interactive org [Music]