I​n 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question, describing the crucial role that coal played in British economic development. Here, he enunciated what has come to be known as the Jevons paradox, which stated that improvements in resource efficiency leads to greater resource use as the expansion of scale occasioned by lower operating costs overwhelms the savings due to greater efficiency. The implications for any sustainability scenario are enormous and a major theme of this book. While The Coal Question provided the theory that was a precursor to peak...

The book is about global energy use, its past and present, and its increasingly uncertain future. It lists the various ecological problems facing our planet, not just climate change, and how their gravity has been underestimated. It briefly looks at the various solutions, apart from renewable energy, proposed for solving the problems our present energy use raises, including solar radiation management, carbon dioxide removal, nuclear energy, and energy efficiency. Renewable energy (RE) is seen by many as the panacea for a variety of environmental challenges, and with the New Green Deal, even...