A vast global edifice was built on the use of fossil fuels | letters
Will Hutton states that living standards have risen fortyfold in the past 250 years thanks to capitalism, science and technology ("Innovation will save our warming planet - so where is the investment?", Comment). He then says, as though it were a separate issue, that similar transformations now need to be made in global energy production. He misses the fact that this stunning growth in living standards, not to mention the eightfold increase in world population, is almost entirely the result of exploiting cheap fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Without them, today's capitalism, science and technology may not even have evolved.
Climate change has been well described as a "wicked" problem; it leaves us with this vast global economic edifice that was built on the naive, unthinking expectation of endlessly burning cheap fossil fuels to drive equally limitless growth. We are now left facing utterly profound transformations from our short-lived "consumer society", far beyond the blinkered, fossil-fuel era ideologies of our politicians and economists.
Aidan Harrison
