The jarring fact is that humanity just finished spending two centuries getting rid of renewable energy and replacing it with fossil fuels (see figure 7.2). When everyone was poor, the whole world cooked and kept warm using polluting renewable energy sources like wood and dung. Over a century and a half, we shed our reliance on renewable energy and powered the industrial revolution with fossil fuels. For the last fifty years, the level of renewables globally has hardly budged from a level of around 13–14 percent.
