Historical perspective on the transition to alternative fuels to meet the greenhouse gas challenge

Abstract

The worldwide consensus is that global climate change is being driven by humanity’s release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Acting on the challenge of reducing fossil fuel and, particularly, petroleum consumption is our collective task. The need to act can seem daunting, given the enormous amount of petroleum that is consumed on a daily basis around the world, which has reached nearly 100 million barrels per day. However, humanity has seen major changes in our reliance on energy resources, in transportation and other sectors, over the last two centuries. Those changes have gotten us into this situation, but they provide more hope for our next transition as well. We can and must expand the adoption of low-carbon intensity renewable fuels, and we must do so in less than three decades, if we hope to limit the global temperature increase to less than 2°C. This paper provides a brief historical perspective on the use of transportation fuels and the transition that humanity must achieve and reports on a recent demonstration to support that transition.

Keywords

• renewable fuels
• sustainability
• transportation
• greenhouse gases
• climate change