Boy, it’s hard to stay optimistic these days, what with the impending doom of our species at the hands of … our species. Namely, human-caused climate change. Climbing temperatures are ripping apart ecosystems, and rising seas are already forcing people from their homes. If an asteroid was going to destroy our planet, now would be the time to just get it over with.

But today lands an uplifting and intriguing, if not counterintuitive, study in the journal Nature Energy. An international team of scientists has developed a global scenario called Low Energy Demand, arguing that humanity’s appetite for things like electric cars and cellphones, as well as the development of better building standards, can drive a revolution in efficiency that could help lower energy demand and encourage the proliferation of renewable energy. The researchers claim that if several trends fall into place, we’d be able to make the idealistic goal set by the Paris Climate Agreement to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees C.

To be clear: This is a highly theoretical scenario, not a certainty. It’s based on assumptions—technological adoption, population growth, etc.—and it is necessarily imperfect, like any model. These researchers aren’t saying, “Hooray, salvation!” They’re saying that given lots of converging trends in sustainability and efficiency, humanity could yet make big progress in tackling the problem of climate change.

“This seems to be a positive story,” says the study’s lead author, Arnulf Grubler of Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. “We can promote sustainable development. We can stay below 1.5 degrees if we focus on energy end use, on the way people use energy and promote sustainable development, and here the key aspect is efficiency.”

This is how the researchers went about it. They identified major drivers of change in energy use, for example cities becoming test beds for innovations like the sharing economy. This is broken down into more specific trends, like the rise of shared electric vehicle fleets. “If everybody buys an electric car, well then you have to wait 12, 14 years for innovations to be rolled out into the marketplace, because people will not prematurely sell their car or scrap it,” says Grubler. “But in a car-sharing scheme, or shared mobility, we use these assets so much that it's actually natural to replace these assets very regularly.”

This brings rapid innovation. And say you've got solar panels at home to charge your electric car. Not only can you send that energy into the grid when you're not at home, but the battery in your electric car can store energy for someone else to tap into. You're no longer just a consumer of energy, but an active participant in the dynamics of the grid.

Or take mobile phones. Now in the hands of billions people, users want their phones to do more, to replace more energy-hungry devices, like TVs. They want them to be more energy efficient. Those kinds of market forces—or consumerism, depending how you look at it—could in a way drive down energy usage.

The researchers then reviewed studies that showed what services humans would need to raise their living standards, particularly in the global south. "At this stage, we look at given these rising activity levels, how can we provide for those with dramatically less energy?" says Charlie Wilson, a coauthor on the paper and climate change scientist at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK. "And part of the answer is technologies can become much more energy efficient."