Sublime

We still do not know most of the particulars of this coming transition, but one thing remains certain: it will not be (it cannot be) a sudden abandonment of fossil carbon, nor even its rapid demise—but rather its gradual decline.[85] 2.

The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the

The Inga would be fifty times larger than the Hoover Dam, which serves eight million people in California, Arizona, and Nevada.80 But for cheap electricity and LPG to pay for themselves, and not depend on charitable donations from European governments and American philanthropists, the Congo needs security, peace, and industrialization of the kind

More than $30 a barrel was a demand-destroying price and by 1986 oil was again selling at just $13 a barrel, setting the stage for yet another round of globalization—this time centered on China, whose rapid modernization was driven by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms and by massive foreign investment. Two generations later, only those who lived

A graph of the total exogenous energy usage of humanity (that is, energy from all sources outside our own bodies) over time is flat until about 1800, after which it becomes roughly exponential, starting slowly and then rising more and more steeply. The largest share of that growth comes from the increasing extraction and combustion of fossil fuels.

We need very large (multi-gigawatt-hour) storage for big cities and megacities, but so far the only viable option to serve them is pumped hydro storage (PHS): it uses cheaper nighttime electricity to pump water from a low-lying reservoir to high-lying storage, and its discharge provides instantly available generation.[76] With renewably generated

many techniques whose everyday use keeps defining and shaping the modern civilization had not undergone any fundamental change during the course of the 20th century. Their qualitative gains (higher efficiency, increased reliability, greater convenience of their use, lower specific pollution rates) took place without any change of basic,

550,00 t and