Sustainability’s Inconvenient Truth

A book called How the World Really Works argues that “we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon. The author, the polymath Vaclev Smil, declares it will take at a minimum several decades, but perhaps well over a century, to move away from our dependance on fossil fuels. This conclusion is based on a scientific examination of industries that rely on carbon-based fuel