The Scale of the Problem

Globally – Civilisation needs very large quantities of energy without producing any CO2.

This is more than just powering houses, and more than just generating electricity.

We also need energy for many other things:

  • food production & agriculture
  • manufacturing
  • transport
  • construction
  • infrastructure building
  • industry – making, refining & creating raw materials
  • and ideally energy to reverse the damage we have already done

Note: Even though the CO2 production fell slightly in 2020 because of Covid19 lock-downs, we still, globally, continued to produce CO2 and the CO2 in the atmosphere still increased, just slightly less quickly than before.

Virtually all respectable scientists agree that CO2 emissions have damaged our planet – not just global warming, or the melting of the ice caps, but also the acidification of the oceans, sea-rise levels, and changes to global weather patterns

To save our planet, in all its wonderful diversity, and provide a future for our children, grand-children and all of humanity, we need to stop all CO2 emissions, but more than that, we also need to start pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere, to restore the planet to its previous state.

Consequently, we need to stop pulling any fossil fuels (Coal, Oil or Gas) out of the ground, simply in order to burn them for energy.

The currently proposed solutions are a good start, but not enough.

The scale of our current dependence on fossil fuels is huge, as can be seen from the following graph. It shows how the global annual consumption of energy, from the various sources, increased in the decade up to 2019. Figures for coal, oil and gas from 1973 and 2004 are included to give a little historical reference. These are from numbers published by the International Energy Aurthority, the US Energy Information Agency and recent BP Statistical Reviews of energy.

Fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, provide heat energy which is used both to generate electricity, and directly as heat. Looking at how that energy was used, in 2019 approximately 55% of the coal, 42.5% of the gas and just under 4% of the oil was used to produce electricity. That amounted to just over 31% of the combined fossil fuels burnt. The rest was used in industry, for transport and some for domestic use. This balance has been broadly the same for several years.

Looking at electricity generation, nearly 63% of all electricity was generated from burning fossil fuels. The proportion of electricity produced from renewables is increasing, but is still only a very small fraction of the electricity generated. Worldwide, electricity is not yet a “clean green” form of energy. Until we change that balance, then the more we use electricity, the more fossil fuels we will burn. The following diagram illustrates this.