The Industrial Revolution, fueled by combustion of fossil fuels, has provided rapid technology developments including remarkable advancements in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, transportation, electricity generation, medicine, and communication. These advancements have driven unparalleled economic developments that have been progressively undermined by city smog and greenhouse gas pollution of the global environment and damaging climate changes. Planetary-scale gains of solar energy and warming of Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and continents by greenhouse gases are increasingly intensified by mining and burning more than one million years' accumulations of fossil coal, oil, and natural gas each year.
The present stage of the Industrial Revolution adds more than 60 million new vehicles per year to the world's active fleet of about one billion vehicles that are powered by engines designed exclusively and specifically for internal combustion of spark-ignited gasoline or compression-ignited diesel fuel selections. Fuel tanks for this rapidly growing population of vehicles are almost entirely designed for low pressure storage of liquid gasoline or diesel fuel and include subsystems for filtering and admitting air as fuel is removed, minimizing vapor emissions, filtering withdrawn fuel, measuring and providing a signal representing the amount of fuel remaining in storage.
Increasingly expensive and energy-intensive conversion of tar-sands and/or drilling of very deep formations to develop production, long-distance transportation, and refining technologies are required for conversion of crude oil resources into octane-rated gasoline and cetane-rated diesel fuel suitable for storage as liquid fuels at ambient temperature and pressure. Such practices include occasional catastrophes such as the B-P Deepwater Horizon blow-out disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers, injured 16 others, and continued to spew poisonous brine, crude oil, and natural gas as it produced the largest accidental marine contamination in the world and the most harmful environmental disaster in U.S. history.
The global environment is increasingly subjected to adverse changes due largely to atmospheric accumulations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, oxides of nitrogen, visible and invisible carbonaceous particulates and various toxins such as benzene and petro-photo-chemical peroxyacetyl nitrate all of which are produced by depletive production and combustion of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas to manufacture and then to provide the refined fuel supplies that are combusted by such vehicles. Earth's atmosphere is warming, polar cap and glacier ice is melting at increasing rates and permafrost is decaying along with more extreme weather related events such as damages due to floods, mud-slides, hurricanes, tornados, hail storms and extended droughts in essential agricultural areas.
National Science Foundation's atmospheric science studies show that the relatively short Industrial Revolution has already produced a greater amount of global warming than all planetary warming events of the previous 11,000 years and new all-time high temperatures continue to be measured. Accordingly from now on global temperatures will continue to climb and produce more severe weather extremes as a result of continued dependence upon burning fossil fuels.
The amount of solar energy that enters Earth's atmosphere each year is about 5.5×1024 J/year, which is a minute fraction of the total solar radiation. Burning fossil fuels and other anthropogenic greenhouse gas production activities now cause an increased solar gain of more than 1×1023 J/yr. Such greenhouse gas production activities of the industrial revolution have inadvertently plunged our planet into conflict against the ambivalent but undefeatable power of the sun. Greenhouse gases now capture more radiant solar energy every hour than all the nuclear bombs ever exploded and will continue to do so 24-hours a day, 7 days each week. Earth's atmosphere and oceans convert this enormous energy gain into global warming and increased evaporation of the oceans along with increased frequency or severity of hurricanes, thunderstorms, tornadoes, floods, and melting of previously stable ice masses to produce casualties and increasingly expensive destruction of communities and agricultural lands.
Power plants, the transportation sector, and manufacturing operations annually deplete finite reserves of fossil fuels that required more than a million years to accumulate and produce airborne particles and gaseous oxides of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur. Carbon-rich particles ranging in size from about 2.5 microns and larger that are produced by combustion of hydrocarbons in diesel and gasoline engines are increasingly identified as causes of respiratory diseases, cancer, and cardiovascular problems along with global warming.
Greenhouse gas driven climate changes include warming and degradation of vast permafrost regions, which causes rotting of previously frozen organic deposits and melting of clathrates, which releases methane and carbon dioxide from large land areas. Vast amounts of sea bottom clathrate deposits are also subject to global warming along with ocean current changes that trigger additional releases of methane and carbon dioxide.
The total carbon dioxide emissions by electric power plants in the United States exceeded 2.5 billion metric tons (2.756 Bn tons) in 2007 (Table 4). The largest fuel groups—coal, natural gas, and propane—dominated carbon dioxide emissions, over 94 percent of the total in 2007. Coal alone represented 78 percent of all CO2 emissions by electric power plants, or nearly 2 billion metric tons in 2007.
Combustion of the carbon content of such fossil fuels sacrifices opportunities to produce high-value durable goods including carbon-reinforced equipment for collection of far more renewable solar, wind, moving water, and geothermal energy than provided by burning such carbon. Illustratively it is possible to produce and deliver more electrical energy every month from a carbon-reinforced wind turbine-generator compared to wasteful burning of such carbon in a central power plant.
Carbon donor substances are also lost by allowing organic wastes to directly escape into the atmosphere or to be rotted or burned. Considerable amounts of methane and carbon dioxide from permafrost degradation, landfills, and stranded petroleum production along with animal feeding and milking operations are vented into the atmosphere as highly damaging greenhouse gases because of unsatisfactory systems for collection, storage, transport, and utilization of such gases.
In addition to adverse health and environment implications, the world economy is dependent upon annual combustion of more than a million years' of finite fossil deposits and such detrimental dependence forces economic inflation and ultimate wealth depletion. Factors contributing to wealth depletion include loss of human productivity due to illnesses (i.e. cancers, lung and cardiovascular diseases etc.) caused by stratospheric ozone depletion and pollution of air, water and soil resources; loss of agricultural productivity on polluted, storm damaged, or drought stricken lands; loss of built environments and improvements due to increasing sea levels and damaging intrusions; loss of ocean productivity because of acidification and pollution including loss of market demand and value due to heavy metal contamination; economic inflation due to depletion of finite resources including fossil fuels and critical materials; losses due to attacks by terrorists recruited in response to growing un-employment anguish and despair, and burdensome defense expenses required to protect against terrorist acts and due to conflicts for control of petroleum and other finite resources.
Accordingly there is a need to produce a wealth expansion economy in communities throughout the world to overcome unacceptable wealth depletion caused by the present dependence upon burning more than a million years' of fossil accumulations each year.