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The future will be cold and dark if we don’t have a radical rethink

With energy, we’re tinkering around the edges — new sources such as nuclear fusion are the only solution

The Sunday Times

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is rightly hailed as an 18th-century masterpiece, but it contains a fascinating omission: throughout its 1,008 pages (in my edition), the word “energy” is not mentioned once. The same is true of more modern classics on economics such as David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations and Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth.

This is curious when you consider that it is impossible to conduct economic activity — indeed, to sustain life itself — in the absence of energy. Think of purchasing a bagel: it takes energy to turn natural gas into fertiliser, to transport the fertiliser to the field, to power the tractor, to sow and plant the wheat seeds, to till, harvest, and grind the