People used to burn mostly wood for energy, then coal, then oil. Each material has more energy per carbon molecule than the last. Natural gas releases still more energy per carbon molecule, and nuclear fission is a different paradigm that doesn't emit carbon at all during power generation. Neither of the last two has come close to reaching its full potential as an energy source.

The US met the goals in the Paris Agreement this year, mostly by using domestic natural gas. This kind of progress is not going to stop because everyone wants to go back to being covered in coal soot. We'll probably be using mostly carbon-free energy sources by the end of the century.

Or, people might try so desperately to claim the power to "save the world" that a war breaks out and we go back to burning wood for survival.

How do you know that progress won’t stop? There’s no market force encouraging lower carbon emissions.

Your statement that wood has less energy for its carbon emissions is highly misleading. It may be technically correct, but since that carbon recently came out of the atmosphere, the net emission is zero. The actual trend, then, is zero carbon emissions, then a lot, then less. That seems rather uninformative when looking at where things would head in the future.

Forests are not a linear system. If everyone still burned wood for power we'd lose millions of acres of forest very quickly, and they wouldn't grow back. Unless/until the people died off I guess.

> The US met the goals in the Paris Agreement this year, mostly by using domestic natural gas.

It certainly did not. Where did you get that information?

Yep that's wrong, my bad. Emissions are going down, but not enough for those targets.

Ironically, the current US government intervention, at least in rhetoric, is encouraging more coal -- more inefficiency, counter to the free market forces.

>"We'll probably be using mostly carbon-free energy sources by the end of the century."

That's around 60 years too late, by current estimations.

Change needs to happen a lot faster than that.