Carbon taxes or auctioned emissions permits not only address climate change but recapture some of the windfall profits of fossil fuel exporters.
As a result, about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide are sent into the atmosphere every year, making fossil fuel consumption the biggest of all humankind's unwitting geoengineering experiments.
Compared with free electrons, fossil fuels would be seen as ludicrously expensive and dirty, and so carbon emissions would plummet.
But the unavoidable reality is that fossil fuels like coal are deeply embedded in our energy system, and we'll have to use them for years.
It seems to me that it is entirely possible for science to have developed without the rapid massive industrialization that the wide use of fossil fuels made possible.
That would involve putting a floor under the price of fossil fuels by imposing a price on carbon emissions and import duties on oil to keep the domestic price above, say, $70 per barrel.
To say that travel is the luxury - and not necessity - of the fossil fuel generation is an over-simplification.
Scottish peat bogs hold three-quarters of all the carbon in British ecosystems - equivalent to around a century of emissions from fossil fuel burning.
Taxing fossil fuels or their use to reflect their environmental damages also makes sense.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: One deadly explosion while extracting fossil fuels may be regarded as a misfortune, but two within a month looks like carelessness.
Could it be that having all this free energy lying around in fossil fuels offered us a dangerous dose of cultural steroids, the evolutionary equivalent of human growth hormone?
It can be extracted without burning a fossil fuel such as coal, gas, or oil.
We intend to increase supplies of natural gas, the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, we offer coal and biomass gasification technology and we're a sizable player in wind.
Atmospheric brown clouds are made up mostly of soot - suspended carbon particles - produced by people burning biomass and fossil fuels.
That means any efforts aimed at limiting greenhouse gas concentrations will have to be even more stringent in reducing the burning of fossil fuels, clearing of forests and the like.
That means the drop in oxygen will depend largely on how much more fossil fuel we burn.
It could alternatively be used to grow bioenergy crops, which would displace fossil fuels.
It's a tall order: Over the next few decades, the world will need to wean itself from dependence on fossil fuels and drastically reduce greenhouse gases.
The U. S. meanwhile sits on largely untapped fossil fuel resources, including coal, natural gas and oil.
You believe that instead of trying to replace fossil fuels with other energy sources, we should let the system slide.
We have fossil fuel on Earth.
It is produced from the burning of fossil fuels (coal and oil) and the smelting of mineral ores that contain sulfur.
Other factors include changes in solar activity, the increased water vapour that can be held by warmer air and soot and other particles produced by fossil fuel and wood burning in Asia.
Once the energy and fossil fuel used in herbicide production are taken into account, claims of environmental sustainability for GM RR soy with no-till systems collapse.
But the other trend is that the price of coal and other fossil fuels are going up.
Petroleum is a fossil fuel.
They pointed out that the excavation of fossil fuels has its own history of catastrophic accidents, including coal mine collapses and the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
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