The dilemma of fossil fuel use and global climate change

The use of fossil fuels and relationship to climate change is discussed. As the use of fossil fuels has grown, the problems of protecting the environment and human health and safety have also grown, providing a continuing challenge to technological and managerial innovation. Today that challenge is to control atmospheric emissions from combustion, particularly those emissions that cause acidic deposition, urban pollution, and increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. Technology for reducing acidic deposition is available and needs only to be adopted, and the remedies for urban pollution are being developed and tested. How effective or expensive these will be remains to be determined. The control of emissions of the greenhouse gas, CO{sub 2}, seems possible only be reducing the total amounts of fossil fuels used worldwide, and by substituting efficient natural gas technologies for coal. Long before physical depletion forces the transition away from fossil fuels, it is at least plausible and even likely that the greenhouse effect will impose a show-stopping constraint. If such a transition were soon to be necessary, the costs would be very high because substitute energy sources are either limited or expensive or undesirable for other reasons. Furthermore, the costs would be unevenly felt and would be more oppressive for developing nations because they would be least able to pay and, on average, their use rates of fossil fuels are growing much faster than those of many industrialized countries. It is prudent, therefore, to try to manage the use of fossil fuels as if a greenhouse constraint is an important possibility.