FIGURE 1 Energy the Enabler Prior to the wide spread use of coal in Europe, the forests were rapidly being consumed. And as history is repeating itself in India and Africa and forests are disappearing into fires for cooking so is history repeating itself in China with coal. Burning coal to fuel the fires of economic development and heating houses is transforming China's major cities into the same polluted conditions that industrial England experienced before the advent of natural gas and electricity. Increasing consumption of fossil fuels for the lack of practical economical alternatives is increasing the pressures on the global environment. Humanity is conducting an enormous, unplanned, and globally pervasive experiment that has consequences that are as yet impossible to predict, even with the use of super computers. The evidence of environmental damage and change has grown large enough to produce notable effects on vital ecosystems. An unanswered question with grave consequences is whether the impacts of mankind's lifestyles will cause gradual change or induce a violent swing to a new equilibrium state. Ecologists refer to this phenomena as "self-organizing criticality" where a complex society or system automatically and unconsciously organizes itself into a so-called critical state that is precariously poised on the edge of catastrophe or the cusp of a bifiircation between the current familiar state and perhaps a more hostile one. Economic development and the availability of high quality energy has been closely correlated. Also as noted above the lack of high quality energy results in
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