Well, I'll start by saying we didn't do it on purpose.
So if you go back to the 1700s,
before the Industrial Revolution,
the population of the world was about 500 million people.
Today, we are approaching 8 billion people,
and by 2050 it's going to be 10 billion people.
All of those people have been able to have been born
and live healthy and productive lives
because of what went on in the Industrial Revolution.
So in 1712, a guy called Thomas Newcomen
invented the first practical combustion engine.
Back in those days, before the Industrial Revolution,
the maximum amount of work you could do as a person
was about one kilowatt hour.
Average energy consumption today, for most people,
is 60 kilowatt hours.
So all that energy goes into
basically providing us our healthy, happy lives,
and all the things we eat, keeping us warm,
letting us travel around.
And that all happened
because engineers invented the first engine.
Without those engines,
we wouldn't have had massive population expansion
and we'd still be living nice agricultural lives, I guess.
If you think that most of our society as humans
is built on fossil fuels,
all the food we eat, all the energy we use,
electricity we use, all the things that we build,
the houses we run, and all cost energy
and have a carbon cost.
Up until very recently, most those things have been
entirely dependent on fossil fuels.
And so since the Industrial Revolution,
engineers have been finding ways
to do things more efficiently and better
and more cost effectively, but always using fossil fuels
as the underlying technology,
even when it's not apparent.
In the next 20 to 30 years,
we're gonna have to do all the same things again
and solve all the same problems again
but without using fossil fuels.
And that's a huge challenge.
And that's something that can't be done
without engineering simulation
and lots of experimentation too.
I don't think we're gonna be able to
meet our climate change goals
in reducing carbon emissions without lots of innovation.
And innovation only really happens these days
as a consequence of simulation and test.
You have ideas, you need to test them,
you need to explore them,
and you need to evolve them basically.
And so simulation tools like Simcenter
are gonna be crucial in engineering a future
in which we solve problems we've already solved before,
but we have to solve them
but this time without using fossil fuels
or without releasing heaps of greenhouse gases.
So I don't think we can achieve our climate change goals,
our carbon reductions,
without using extensive simulation and tests.
And I think Simcenter is one of the best products
for doing that.
So I describe myself as a reluctant environmentalist.
Like most people up until recently
I was flying around the world on holiday,
on a business trip,
traveling to America five or six times a year,
driving a big petrol sports car at the time,
and eating lots of meat,
not worrying too much about energy consumption.
But when you start reading
about some of the consequences of climate change,
you hear about people like Greta Thunberg
appealing for people of my generation
to take things seriously,
and you start reading around the topic
and realizing what the actual consequences
of our lifestyles are,
then I think, like most people,
I had to make a change.
Now it's not easy to make all those changes
and I haven't made all of those changes,
but everything I do now, I consider the carbon emissions of
and I can try and change my behavior a lot.
So I've just bought an electric car.
First new car I've ever owned.
I take a lot less flights.
So I only fly where it's absolutely essential.
And I'm trying to eat less meat as well,
and I consider the energy consumption in my house every day.
So I try and do the things that I can do,
but I'm also obsessed by the idea of carbon emissions
and reducing carbon emissions.
As an engineer, I think it's a really interesting question.
So it's something I'm really, really interested in,
but not something that I do willingly
because I think we have to do it.