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Unburnable fuels

Abstract:

There is an urgency to stop the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The concept of unburnable fuels refers to fossil fuels that cannot be extracted and burned to avoid the climate crisis. At a planetary level, materials are increasingly being extracted. Between 1970 and 2023, the domestic extraction of materials (biomass, fossil fuels, and minerals) more than tripled (from 31.1 to 101.8 billion tons). Extraction per inhabitant rose from 8.5 to 12.8 tons in the same period. Fossil energy—although it has decreased in the total extractive composition by almost four percentage points in 53 years—has increased by 2.6 times. The world requires a socio-environmental transition. The most appropriate thing to do is not to extract in areas of great cultural wealth and high biodiversity, even more so when it is known with scientific certainty that it is impossible to extract all the reserves of exhaustible natural resources on the planet.