World Energy Outlook Roars Out a Warning
Here’s the latest report of the International Energy Agency, which is run by many of the world’s largest oil-consuming nations. It’s an annual piece called “World Energy Outlook,” and warns that without radical changes in the world’s energy infrastructure in the next five years, humans will make climate change irreversible.
Bob Dylan fans will recognize that the last few words of the title come from “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.” Let’s do our best to make sure that’s not the case, i.e., that a hard rain does not, in fact, fall.
This is highly interesting, Craig.
As you and many others have adroitly pointed out, there are plenty of reasons apart from climate disruption to get off fossilized sunlight and onto the modern stuff that pours down on us every day (6000 times more than we’d use to run everything).
These reasons include primarily national security – as we only have a little over 2$ of the world’s oil and use 25% of global production) and, not a distant second, the health of our children and the biosphere – as petroleum products and their combustion cause cancer, respiratory problems, etc.
However, it is nice to see a global energy body recognize and warn against one of the several cliffs toward which we’ve been accelerating.