That will hurt people who invest in fossil fuels.

As energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies improve and prices drop, global demand for fossil fuels will decline, “stranding” new fossil fuel ventures likely before 2035, according to the study in Nature Climate Change, “Macroeconomic impact of stranded fossil fuel assets.”

Researchers from Cambridge University and elsewhere found technological advances will strand fossil-fuel assets regardless of “whether or not new climate policies are adopted,” but that “the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2 C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand.”

That could “amount to a discounted global wealth loss of US$1 4 trillion,” and Russia, the U.S., and Canada could see their fossil-fuel industries nearly shut down, the report says.

The best way to limit these negative impacts is to divest from fossil fuels and speed up the transition to a diversified, energy-efficient, clean-energy economy. But many of those technologies haven’t been tested on a commercial scale, and burning biomass creates pollution and affects land use, habitat and food production and the new report says warming could be limited without them.

According to a Carbon Brief article, researchers used integrated assessment models to determine how improving energy efficiency in the global north and south could help limit warming to 1.5 C while fulfilling international sustainable development goals, including “zero hunger,” “good health and wellbeing” and “affordable and clean energy” for all.

Technological and social innovation at the consumer and industrial level, including “the spread of digital services in the global south and the rise of vehicle-sharing in the global north” would fuel most improvements.