This book is an effort to explain climate change and its relation to our use of energy. Climate change is caused by unstoppable increases of energy consumption all over the world. World leaders have learned that hose countries with the highest energy use are also the richest and have by far the highest standard of living. It is no wonder that lesser developed countries are trying to catch up and are thereby accelerating the accumulation of heat trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The unconstrained and often wasteful use of energy resources is leading us into an ever more dangerous quagmire. More and more greenhouse gases are being emitted all over the world. We have been adding greenhouse gases in ever increasing quantities for more than one hundred years. As a result, the Earth is now beginning to overheat. In the beginning, natural processes could absorb carbon dioxide emission from fossil fuel combustion. This ability is now being compromised by the continuous growth of fossil fuel burning. The oceans can absorb carbon dioxide. However, this absorption process has natural limitations, which we are now breaching while simultaneously making ocean waters more acidic. More acidification has consequences and leads to leaching of carbonate deposits deep in our oceans with resulting carbon dioxide release. Nature has begun to fight back!

The unconstrained and wasteful use of energy resources is now producing consequences. The world has been warming for more than a century and is now beginning to overheat. More frequent and more powerful windstorms, more destructive floods, and more disastrous droughts are being observed all over the world. Glaciers and ancient ice deposits in Polar Regions are melting faster and faster. We all know that we need to curtail the world’s energy consumption drastically. However, we also know that any restrictions on the unfettered use of energy will lead to economic slowdowns and may cause worldwide recessions.

The book proposes practical and effective ways for creating a world that can live without persistent fear of ever-escalating energy prices, fear of more frequent and more destructive natural disasters, fear of failing world economies, and fear of wars for vanishing and scarce resources. A world without fear is the world we want to live in. And more importantly, a world without fear we can leave in good conscience to our grandchildren and to their offspring.

The book’s purpose is to propose and explain a comprehensive plan that gives direction to scientists, engineers, politicians, business leaders, and to the world’s citizens in the hope that the world community can arrive at a widely acceptable and practical blueprint for saving the world’s precious ecology.

In this book, one can learn:

• Why well established technologies have led to our present predicament
  
• About the cost and danger of doing nothing
• Why we are experiencing climate change and how much of it can be reversed
  
• How novel technologies will provide a wide range of opportunities for new industrial developments
• How we can replace destructive fossil fuel technologies with other technologies that can generate electric energy and substitute motor fuels by converting renewable sun energy
  

The book does not intend to teach technologies but wants to explain in broad strokes why some energy technologies are more preferable than others, and why it is necessary to use a multitude of different technologies to reach a variety of common goals.

We all want to preserve the world’s precious ecology, we want countries to prosper, we want people to escape poverty, and we want to arrive at a stable, vibrant world economy with stable energy prices. Above all, we want to live in peace and do not want to fight wars for scarce energy resources.

The author is the first to propose a practicable agenda for halting and eventually reversing climate change. He explains and verifies his assertion that we can reach these goals and that we can eventually halt and may someday even reverse climate changes.

To save the world and make it a safer, a more prosperous, and a more peaceful place, we must continue to use several existing technologies, we must eliminate the destructive emissions of greenhouse gases, and we must develop several novel energy technologies. In the book a first, comprehensive plan for saving the world is proposed and needed efforts are detailed and specified.

Dr. Klaus H. Hemsath has spent his entire career as scientist, process engineer, inventor, Corporate VP, entrepreneur, and CEO in the energy technology business. He has broad experience in sizing, designing, installing, testing, and operating large industrial processing and production equipment. He holds more than 60 US Patents in technology areas related to energy utilization and energy conversion.