Spurred on by the myriad
inventions from the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the related
consumer demand for the conveniences, the Industrial Revolution itself played a
major role in what would come to be known as global warming or climate change.
In 2015, the Paris Agreement stipulated, notably without any enforcement, a global
temperature rise of 1.5C as a ceiling. Just a decade later, scientists were
saying that the threshold would be exceeded. Even amid the searing heat in the
E.U. during the summer of 2026, the fear around the world in halls of
government was less oriented to the what the new normal climatically would
bring than to whether Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz, which was known as
an oil checkpoint through which over 20 billion barrels of oil were being
transported per day. It was as though our species no longer had any control
over how far global warming would go.
The full essay is at "On the Transition to Clean Energy."
