PASADENA – For decades, the development of renewable energy – and the policy debates that surround it – has focused largely on electricity generation. But more than 60% of the world’s energy is provided directly by chemical (mainly fossil) fuels, with no intermediate conversion to electricity. No realistic effort to combat global warming by cutting carbon emissions can ignore this fundamental constraint. Indeed, in the United States and other industrialized countries, many applications that rely on fossil fuels (such as air transport or aluminum production) cannot be reconfigured to use electrical power. Moreover, fossil fuels are required to produce electricity as well, both to meet demand...
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