The Energy and Climate Policy Debate: An Introduction

Reliable and affordable energy is essential for virtually all human activity: heating, lighting, transportation, agriculture, and industry. The history of harnessing energy to meet human needs maps to the tremendous progress in achieving material well-being, in opening new vistas, and in freeing people from the extreme physical toil and constraints of time and place faced by earlier generations. But now there is concern that human activity, particularly the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—will cause warming that may lead to serious problems.

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