The challenges facing the 21st century are staggering: rapidly increasing population, mounting social instability due to global imbalances of wealth and welfare, resource scarcity and resulting conflicts related to their exploitation and distribution, and certainly the ongoing distress of the environment as a whole. Such severe conditions, including climate change, continue to become greater in number, complexity, and clarity, even though most of them had already been introduced as areas of concern in the 1970s and 1980s. The book describes potential strategies that will play an essential role in curbing carbon emissions, reducing - or replacing - fossil fuel usage. To better understand the current global energy industry, the book is unique in showing energy consumption data across the globe in comparable units, and it explains how fossil fuels could be replaced by renewable energy resources.