The burning issue - Walt Patterson

Fire is at the root of our climate problems and it is time we put it out, writes Walt Patterson, Associate Fellow at Chatham House. “We need to switch from using fire to using electricity.”

Walt Patterson's
 "Electricity Vs. Fire:
The Fight for our Future".

Is climate complicated? Yes – except in one key respect. Countless reams of disputed text preceded the Paris Agreement of December 2015. Media coverage before, during and after the summit was hectic with controversy. Yet all the furious disputation that surrounds the climate issue can be traced back to a single common four letter word. The word is fire.

Why fire? In the headlong climate debate worldwide, no one talks about fire. They talk about fossil fuels, about emissions, about carbon dioxide, about increasing global temperature, about floods and droughts, about sea-level rise, about melting glaciers and collapsing ice sheets. These, however, are symptoms of what is wrong. They are not the cause. Somehow the commentators fail to notice or remark that all of these factors arise because of fire.

Read the EnergyPost story by Walt Patterson -“The burning issue.”