How can society transition away from depleting conventional fossil fuel energy without exacerbating climate change by using poorer quality fossil fuels in greater quantities, such as coal or tar sands, and without causing major economic collapse(s) and or massive starvation and famine?

Climate change is of the utmost importance but is, at a fundamental level, a symptom of over-consumption of fossil fuels. We live, to put it simply, in the Age of Oil, and oil is depleting rapidly, and to properly address climate change we need to properly address the cause of the symptom, not the symptom itself. Analyzing current energy consumption patterns so that we as a society are able to slowly power down from a fossil fuel based civilization to a solar based civilization will, in the words of Faber et al. (1996), define how we transition to the next “paradigmatic image of the world”.

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