Climate change: general aspects, and alterations in energy sources and use as responses

Human-induced climate change is a major contemporary challenge, the basic cause of which is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly of CO2, generated by human activities. In this chapter, the following are the principal topics addressed: •failure to control adequately CO2 emissions due to social embedding; • major biophysical processes resulting in climate change and reasons for concern about the use of fossil fuels and other sources of CO2 emissions following the start of the Industrial Revolution; • the general prospects of reducing CO2 emissions by substituting energy sources, by energy savings, and by greater sequestration of CO2; • the scope for substituting the types of resources used for electricity production in order to reduce CO2 emissions and the economics of doing so; • economic strategies to lower fossil fuel use in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; additional sustainability issues (for example, aspects of the availability of stocks of energy resources and their depletion) and the importance of the holistic environmental valuation of alternative forms of energy supply. The use of flow resources is shown to be advantageous from a sustainability and environmental point of view.