Reality thus presses in from both ends. The sheer scale, cost, and technical inertia of carbon-dependent activities make it impossible to eliminate all of these uses in just a few decades. As I detailed in the chapter on energy, we cannot sever that dependence so rapidly, and every realistic long-term forecast concurs: most notably, even the IEA’s most aggressive decarbonization scenario has fossil fuels supplying 56 percent of the global primary energy demand by 2040. Similarly, the enormous scale and cost of material and energy demands make it impossible to resort to direct air capture as a
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