Fossil Fuels and Man's great Choice

Just below the Earth's skin lies masses of layers of fossil fuels, under the sea bed as well as on land, and new technology makes it cheap and easy to extract. It is perhaps the most important dilemma faced by humanity now - what to do with it.

World leaders, energy companies and consumer organisations are delighted to discover a way to provide power that is quick to obtain and so plentiful that it could support the global population for thousands of years to come. Extraction has begun already and the use of techniques such as fracking, which I have written about before, is accelerating even before their dangers, and benefits, remain largely untested. It is unsurprising that a casualty in this sprint for cheap energy is the market for renewables, interest in which is waning among politicians in many countries, relieved to find an easy alternative - and for some the interest was never very strong in the first place.

What is being forgotten in the enthusiasm for ready fuel is not just the environmental damage it does to the locations of the drilling, but the implications it brings for the future of our beautiful planet. The use of these fossil fuels on a major scale and the stripping bare of the protective surface of our lands and seas will raise the temperatures by as much as five or six degrees, making Earth uninhabitable. It will be global warming on a massive, unsustainable scale.

There is much concern and discussion currently about the destabilising effects of conflict with Iran and the financial crisis, but the great threat comes from our love affair with power and the desire to have it at any cost.  The importance of this choice of ours, about how we view and use the planet, could not be greater, but who is listening? Who cares?