There is a BBC show called Bang Goes the Theory that is similar to mythbusters. There was a particular episode where they took a typical UK family and unbeknownst to them put them into a house that was solely powered by electricity generated by bicyclists. It is a stark lesson on how much we take easy energy from fossil fuels for granted:
It is quite foolish and selfish that generations living from about 1900 to 2100 will burn up 3 billion years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels.
It will be at the least drastically painful when the fossil fuels run out if we don't take action.
You're in a startup, and you see that your "burn" gives you approximately six months of runway. Your revenue is increasing, but too slow. The lines do not intersect.
Doing nothing proactive about the fossil fuel problem is identical to doing nothing proactive in that scenario. "Burn" is quite literal in this analogy, and "revenue" is analogous to our ability to tap and utilize other sources of energy economically. Right now we're like a startup on a death march to bankruptcy. Barring benevolent aliens, I doubt there's any more venture capital available.
A lot of people have a cognitive block about this issue because historically it's an issue raised by "liberals" and "hippies." But it's not a political issue. It's a physics issue. It's as "hard" and objective an issue as it gets.
If humanity were to fail as a species and you asked me (in the afterlife?) why, I'd say "because we used ideas and facts as indicators of membership in social cliques, making it impossible to think objectively about things without threatening our standing in those groups."
http://www.electricpedals.com/human-power-station/
It is quite foolish and selfish that generations living from about 1900 to 2100 will burn up 3 billion years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels.
It will be at the least drastically painful when the fossil fuels run out if we don't take action.