while technological progress has eliminated many problems it has also added new and often unexpected ones griibler diamond emissions of greenhouse gases ghg arising from the combustion of fossil fuels are the main cause of anthropogenic global warming all energy technologies whether they are fossilbased or not consume resources use land and pollute air water and the atmosphere energy use has reached a scale at which planetary boundaries are being breached for a range of essential earthsystem processes including in terms of global warming and biodiversity loss which is likely to lead to catastrophic environmental change rockstrom et al