Fossil Fuels

This is a talk about visualizing life without fossil fuels. We have an addiction to fossil fuels and it's not sustainable. When I say we, I'm talking about the so-called developed world. The developed world gets 80 or 90 percent of all its energy from fossil fuels. And living on fossil fuels for energy in this way is not sustainable for three fairly obvious reasons. First, on the left, easily accessible fossil fuels are a finite resource. And so at some point that resource will be exploited and humanity will have to do something else. Second, setting fire to fossil fuels puts carbon dioxide upstairs. So we have the climate motivation, the clear consensus of the climate science community is with substantial error bars still on exactly what might happen. Their advice is this is a geoengineering experiment that we're well advised to stop as soon as possible. And third, even if you don't believe in climate change and even if global fossil fuels aren't running out today, it might be the case that your fossil fuels or our fossil fuels in a particular country or state have run out and you might have to depend on other countries or states for fossil fuels in the future. So you have a security of supply motivation saying let's look into really getting off fossil fuels in a serious way. I find all three of these motivations are equally compelling and I'm just going to take it as given now that we are interested in discussing life after fossil fuels.