Energy is the lifeblood of industrial civilization and an absolutely necessary (albeit certainly not sufficient) condition for lifting the world's poor from their poverty. But current methods of mobilizing civilization's energy are more disruptive of local, regional and global environmental conditions and processes than anything else that humans do.

This dichotomy defines the core of the energy challenge in the century before us: How can we supply enough affordable energy to permit the billions who are currently poor (and the billions more who will be added to their numbers in the decades ahead) to attain prosperity--and to sustain and expand the prosperity of those already rich--without suffering intolerable damage to the environmental dimensions of human well-being in industrial and developing countries alike?

This article was originally published with the title The Quest for Affordable Energy.

Comments