"During the last 200 years, per capita energy usage grew eight-fold, while human population expanded at about the same rate. As a result of energy growth, all the things we do with energy became more doable. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and mining exploded in scale. Energy became so abundant that it seemed we could solve any human problem, now or in the future, just by throwing more energy at it. We even reconfigured our economic system so that it assumes and requires perpetual growth. But growth in fossil-fuel energy can’t continue much longer: depletion and climate change will see to that. And even if we make a wholehearted effort to switch to low-carbon energy sources, we face limits to nature’s supplies of materials with which to make solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, and batteries."
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Activists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesEnvironmentalists from the United StatesJournalists from Missouri
Original Language: English
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"Understanding Power", Resilience (March 23, 2021).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Heinberg
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Richard Heinberg
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