The ancestral home has been sold up to pay for the father's debt. The removal men are in the hall. The feckless father is toasting the future while his wife weeps. In the end, the problems of global environmental change are linked with the rapid increases in human population and with the aspirations of peoples around the world for an improved standard of living. The relative affluence of the developed world is due in no small measure to its profligate use of energy.
Industrial society has an insatiable appetite for fossil fuels.
Combustion of fossil fuel has a deleterious impact not only on the global but also on the local and regional levels. There are three important problems on the local and regional scales relating to the use of fossil fuel. Emission of particulate material associated with the combustion of coal results in a variety of respiratory problems. It was responsible for the devastation wrought by the killer smogs that visited a number of major industrial cities during the 1950s and 1960s, notably in London in 1952. This particular issue was dealt with by restricting use of coal to major power plants and by installing devices to remove particulate material before it was released to the air.