Steel is the skeleton, concrete its flesh, copper is the nervous system, oil its food, fossil energy its life force. The built world and its material inputs are itself another body, an extension of our own physical bodies. Birds build nests, wombats tunnel but humans… we build worlds. This built world is a nanny that nurtures & protects us and the only thing that permits the carrying capacity for 8 billion of us to exist on this planet. Don’t get me wrong. I love going hiking and camping but nature is not our nurturer. It is constantly trying to kill us. Our species never lived in harmony with it, we died in harmony with it and that was mostly children under 5 and women in childbirth. Everyday I go into battle against mother nature in the emergency department. Without this medical battle against nature’s will my son, his mother, my cousin, my father and my uncle would be long dead. All of the core ingredients of this built world that protects us are dependent on fossil fuels for their extraction, construction and reproduction. And this is why we are not taking “meaningful action” on climate change To get a sense of just how large a requirement it is to replace that fossil fuelled “life force” consider that we use 100 billion barrels of oil equivalents (BOE) of fossil fuels annually (~36 billion barrels of oil ~30 billion BOE of gas and ~34 billion BOE of coal.) Each barrel of oil contains 1700kWh of work potential. Compare that to an average human work day where 0.6kWh can be generated. Therefore each BOE contains about 10.5 years of human labour equivalence (~5 years after conversion losses.) That means that the modern human enterprise of industrial civilization is underpinned by 500 billion fossil slaves worth of energy added to our measly 8 billion person workforce (~2 billion + of whom are too young or too old to work) The idea that we can retire this enormous army of fossil slave labour at all, let alone in 27 years, and maintain our industrial civilization, our extraordinary carrying capacity or even a fraction of our current population is laughable. Industrial civilization cannot exist without fossil fuels. Nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal etc require fossil fuels for their construction and supply chains and unfortunately will not scale sufficiently and on meaningful timescales to replace this unimaginably gargantuan once in our species lifetime fossil army. This is not to argue that we should give up and not scale our most viable alternative energies but we must not live in delusion and unrealistic expectations. We are wedded to the fossil created body of our built world.