Engineering a Sustainable and Economically Active Future without Fossil Fuels

The need for mankind to make the transition from a global civilisation powered by fossil fuels, to one powered by non-polluting sources of energy, is at last beginning to impinge on public awareness, now that the science of climate change is becoming established. Unfortunately, obfuscation and procrastination still exists, impeding progress to sustainability as vested interests are increasingly ‘muddying the waters’ by choosing to support technical ‘solutions/fixes’ of doubtful effectiveness. Among these technical fixes, considered in the paper, are carbon capture and storage, nuclear power and hydrogen. Given that the ‘window of opportunity’ to seriously address the carbon emissions problem is arguably just a few years, rather than a few decades, the only sensible, technically sound, and sustainable solution is a rapid and massive adoption of renewables. The key criterion of balancing the growing global demand for power, when the supply emanates from diverse, varied and widespread generation schemes, is examined in this paper, and is shown to be feasible.