Climate change is a wonderful problem, because climate change is pushing humanity with great force further in a direction it has always been going.
Humankind will have a manifold more energy at its disposal than ever before. Humans are the only animals that have systematically learned to tap energy beyond their own muscle power. This has enabled the human being to do things, to think things, to attain consciousness, like no other living being on this planet.
Most of the energy available on earth comes from the sun. Without the sun, the earth would be an ice-cold planet. Fossil energy is nothing more than coagulated solar energy, created over millions of years. It is relatively easy to collect this coagulated energy and release it again. Humans have managed this trick by harnessing fire. It is much more difficult to collect energy directly from the sun and make it usable, because you have to redirect the solar energy from day to night, from one place to another. This requires technology that could only be discovered and developed with tools that required enormous amounts of energy to produce and operate. To be able to harvest and store the energy of the sun, you not only need the energy it takes to build solar, wind or hydroelectric plants, distribution and storage systems, you need a million times more energy to be able to conceive these technologies in the first place. In this sense, one could say that in every single wind turbine there is embodied energy that has been released at all times in human history.
We have not wasted fossil resources, we have used them to get to a new level. We are now able to become independent of the energy that is lying around clotted on the earth.
Non-coagulated energy from the sun and energy from the splitting of the atom has opened doors for humanity to much more energy.
And what is the point of all this?
I have an opinion on that: it is the energy that humanity needs to get closer to understanding.
It is only the last sentence that I would like to discuss.
This understanding will guarantee the survival of future generations, I hope.
Unbelivable how many people still believe the earth is flat.