Researchers have lots of sources to work with in today’s energy environment—petroleum, coal, oil shale, oil sands, natural gas, gas hydrates, nuclear, biomass, geothermal, wind, solar/PV, fuel cells, hydrogen, electrochemical, hydro, tidal, and the ever-present source of the future, fusion. Petroleum, coal, and natural gas account for about 85% of the U.S.’s total energy consumption, with nuclear accounting for just over 8% and renewables accounting for the remainder. These ratios have remained mostly unchanged for the past 10 years. As one of these energy supplies sees a shortage, like petroleum, it’s relatively easy from a technology standpoint to supplant its shortage with supplies from one of the other sources. It might take a few years to implement efficiently, but it’s not likely to cause catastrophic social upheavals.

Changing to any major degree the amounts of non-renewable energy used in the U.S. economy, however, would cause dramatic social and economic effects. But not changing those levels will continue adding climate-warming gases to the environment.

An all-electric energy environment sourced from nuclear, renewable, and some versions of electrochemical is the only situation not likely to add climate-warming gases to the environment—excluding of course, the manufacturing requirements for building, equipping, and sourcing that all-electric environment. However, transitioning from the current petroleum-coal-natural gas environment to the all-electric environment is likely to take decades to implement.

With these time-scales for making effective changes in our energy infrastructure (and adding in the global events as well), it will be interesting to examine the irreversible changes to our warming climate that occur in the interim.

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