How can we stop it and replace it with saner, greener tech (or replace the use of fossil fuels altogether)? That's the better question once we know how it got here.
On the other hand, electric vehicles can help a huge amount for cars and trucks at least. Then we shift the primary fuel to whatever being used by the utility company. That's mostly natural gas, coal, nuclear, and hydro in the USA, followed by a percent and growing of wind and solar.
Of dispatchable options, nuclear, wind, and solar have tiny carbon footprints. Nuclear has very small physical and fuel footprints and runs 24/7, so that's my current favorite. It's also way safer statistically than almost anyone thinks, having saved 1.8 million lives net by displacing air pollution deaths by 2013. Its fuel is also renewable because uranium dissolved in seawater will replenish through erosion faster than we could ever use it for billions of years.
Wind and solar are kicking ass right now. going global scale requires large footprints of storage, land, magnets, coils, etc. I imagine a future of 50/50 nuclear + various forms of solar harvesting.
It's been an hour and still no one's caught this but.. what exactly is this you're referring to? It'd be a fishy looking stoichiometric ratio if the fuel is produced from the seawater.
"One additional aspect of nuclear sustainability—noted long-since by Bernard Cohen—is that a significant fraction of the nuclear fission energy resource is in fact completely “renewable” in the same sense as wind and solar energy [32]. Wind and rain constantly erode the Earth’s crust, which contains an average uranium concentration of 3 parts per million. Rivers then carry this dissolved uranium into the oceans, at a rate of approximately 10,000 MT per year [33]. In a breeder reactor energy system, this is a sufficient rate to supply the world’s entire electricity demand at the present time more than five times over—or is roughly one quarter of what’s needed to supply a continual 100 TW to a hypothetical global civilization of 10 billion persons which is energy supply-replete by any contemporary measure.
As the crust is being eroded by rivers, it is constantly replaced by new layers of rock being pushed upward by plate tectonic processes. The supply of uranium in the Earth’s crust is effectively inexhaustible, on the order of 40 trillion metric tonnes, a factor of 10,000 more than is present in the oceans. At present erosion rates, this source of uranium would last on the order of 4 billion years, similar to the timespan over which the Sun will become a red giant.
Therefore, this assured source of “continually mined-by-Nature and oceanically presented” uranium will last as long as life on Earth does—even if burned at rates sufficient to supply a large fraction of a fully-developed human civilization—and represents an astronomical amount of nuclear energy, one that is in fact truly renewable and inexhaustible by any human measures."
The key point is that we would never run out of fuel as a species if we went big with nuclear.
Thing is that the rates of use ... increased somewhat.
Exponential growth has a way of catching up with you.
Nuclear has a very long-term footpring and some unusual aspects relative to other energy systems. Many of its more notable critics come from inside the industry, or were early pioneers. I'm not so sanguine.
Nuclear waste lasts a long time but we know how to store it for geologic time frames in crystalline bedrock or salt deposits where we have evidence that nothing will move for 200million years. And we only need 1 million until it's safe again.
If you got all your primary energy from nuclear reactors for your entire life, you'd make about 3 soda cans of waste. That's tiny compared to all the alternatives.
With 10 billion people using 40,000x the current per-person USA energy usage, we could power the world for at least 100,000 years with the nuclear resource.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-transitions-history-req...
The same author has just updated his book on energy in world history, this past May. I've read the earlier version and it is excellent, I have reason to believe the update is an improvement on that.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-hist...