The second chapter of this book is about the most basic survival necessity: producing our food. Its focus is on explaining how much of what we rely on to survive, from wheat to tomatoes to shrimp, has one thing in common: it requires substantial, direct and indirect, fossil fuel inputs. Awareness of this fundamental dependence on fossil fuels leads to a realistic understanding of our continued need for fossil carbon: it is relatively easy to generate electricity by wind turbines or solar cells rather than by burning coal or natural gas—but it would be much more difficult to run all field
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