Almost all species depend on photosynthesis for energy. That is, plants capture the energy of sunlight and transform it into chemical energy that they can store and use when needed. Animals like us exploit that sunlight by eating plants or animals that eat plants to recover that stored energy. We also release energy by burning peat, dung, wood, coal, gas, and oil, all of it some form of stored energy from photosynthesis. But fossil fuels are not renewable. They are finite, and now we are burning them on such a scale that the resultant greenhouse gas (CO2) is building up and trapping more heat.

We have also learned to use the energy of uranium in nuclear power plants, but uranium is also finite and non-renewable, and we have no known safe way to dispose of the radioactive wastes. So by exploiting fossil fuels and uranium, we are not only using up non-renewable resources, we are also bequeathing a legacy of problems for our children and grandchildren. That is not sustainable.

Furthermore, uranium and fossil fuels, especially oil and gas, are not evenly distributed over the planet. They occur in often highly volatile political regions like the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela, and Nigeria.

So when the crisis of climate change is focusing our attention on fossil fuels, we have a huge opportunity to shift to a truly renewable and more equitable form of energy, namely sunlight with its associated wind, waves, tides, and biomass. If the U.S. government can make a commitment of $600 billion to a war in Iraq (Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz thinks the bill could be $3 trillion) and $700 billion to failing banks to ensure security, think of what it could do with even a fraction of those dollars to get us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy. Now that would be true security from the geopolitics of oil.