Engineering the Early Demise of Fossil Fuels

Climate change is now scientific fact, and it is equally firmly established that it is of anthropogenic origins, mainly attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. If future generations are to inherit a living, and livable planet, which is self-evidently their right, the current inhabitants have no alternative but to dispense with fossil fuels as a source of power. It is demonstrated here that technically this can clearly be secured before 2050 by transitioning to renewable sources of energy, backed up by ‘clean’ nuclear power. However, effective deployment of these geographically widely dispersed power sources will require power sharing among groups of nations and grid interconnections on a continent spanning basis. It is suggested that effective progress towards the realization of such distributed systems is unlikely to be achieved without cooperative planning and implementation across many nations. An example of this is beginning to emerge in Europe.