When crossing the ocean by sea or by air small differences in the direction you take will result in huge differences in your ultimate destination. Back in the middle of the last century, human society might have made relatively minor adjustments in its trajectory, say, in the growth of consumption of resources including energy, even perhaps deciding that these must level off at some point in the future.
We humans made no such adjustments and so we now find ourselves faced with only draconian choices. But we do not seem to understand that we’ve arrived at a destination far from the one we imagined in 1950. An example is the celebration in the environmental community of a recent federal court decision to invalidate oil and gas leases offered by the U.S. government on 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico. (It turns out that oil and gas companies only bid on 1.7 million of those acres.)
The ostensible reason for invalidating the leases was that the government did not adequately consider the effect of the leases on climate change. The government could do another evaluation and try selling the leases again. But environmental organizations would likely challenge the leases in court again.
While the effects of climate change are already severe and likely to become even more so, global human society is utterly dependent on uninterrupted flows of fossil fuels to function. And, while climate change activists continue to champion a so-called energy transition to green energy sources such as solar and wind, what they might not understand is that so far, these alternatives have been used to augment human energy consumption. They have not displaced fossil fuels at all. Nor are they likely to in any time frame that matters.
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