Tim Garrett

摘要

The atmosphere is a complex system, and our economy is also a complex system, and they both play major roles in our lives. In the mid-2000s, with the film An Inconvenient Truth, many people were thinking about our relationship with climate. I started thinking that everything in the universe must march to the same universal physical principals, whether it's the atmosphere or the economy. So I started wondering: how might the global economy be subject to thermodynamic laws, and how might consumption of energy be related to the economy and things like carbon dioxide emissions? It was a tremendously exciting time for me professionally, because pieces started falling into place. I came to the realization that there might exist a constant relationship between the global economy and its rate of energy consumption. And indeed that turned out to be borne out by the data.