Oil and the like can be extracted at increasingly unbearable cost (same holds for coal and sand oil, shale oil, etc...). It's not just a question of CO2, but of exhausted technology. Something similar happened to the Romans: they called it: "the world is getting old".
A program to build Fusion-Fission thermonuclear power plants program should be started in a hurry. Besides enormous clean energy production, it would allow to get rid of nuclear waste, all over the world, and produce plenty of electricity to run an electrical economy (besides renewable energies).
All indicates that, differently from PURE thermonuclear fusion plants, the technology exists already, it's just a matter of putting together the details. Existing thermonuclear reactor (such as the JET, Joint European Torus) can produce plenty of fast neutrons to split, among other things, conventional, not very radioactive U 238. Future reactors such as ITER aim at producing ten times as much energy thermonuclearly as is put in. But the walls will take a beating.
In a fusion-fission reactor, the walls are made of a fissionable materials (U238 split under fast neutrons, as produced by thermonuclear fusion; enriched in U235 uranium splits under slow neutrons). So the walls get destroyed, made progressively less radioactive (I simplify), but that produces energy. This way all nuclear waste can be burned.
The reason why fusion-fission has not been pushed so far is that Beyond Pain (BP) companies such as BP have zero interest to see it appear.
PA
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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