Although coal, fossil gas, oil, and bioenergy have provided energy that has helped societies until today, such energy has come at a cost, namely increased air pollution, ground and water contamination, land despoilment, global warming, and energy insecurity. While such a cost was accepted in the past, much of the public can no longer stomach the continuous death and illness caused by air pollution from these fuels. Scientists and policymakers similarly no longer believe society can maintain a safe climate and function securely if these fuels continue to be used.

Realizing that it needs to adapt if it wants to stay in business, the fossil-fuel industry first proposed replacing coal with fossil gas as a “bridge fuel” to renewables. It then supported the development of four technologies that it argued would help reduce carbon emissions: carbon capture, synthetic direct air carbon capture, blue hydrogen, and carbon-based electro-fuels. If adopted, these technologies would permit the industry to continue producing fossil fuels in-perpetuity. Similarly, the agriculture industry argued that, because biomass, biofuels, and biogas were all renewable fuels, the industry should be allowed to continue producing energy, especially if carbon capture were added to some of their facilities. Lastly, the nuclear industry, which has suffered slowing development, rising costs, a major meltdown, and unresolved waste issues since 2000, made a concerted effort to be part of the solution by proposing the use of new small and large nuclear reactors. Because the fossil-fuel, agriculture, and nuclear lobbies are strong in many countries, the solutions proposed by these lobbies were incorporated, along with WWS technologies, into “all-of-the-above” policies to address climate change. “All-of-the-above” policies involve promoting nearly all technologies, regardless of their air-pollution impacts, carbon emissions, security risk, cost, effectiveness, or length of time between planning and operation, that allege to address climate. An addition technological fix added to the mix was geoengineering, which consists of a variety of measures largely to increase the reflectivity (albedo) of the Earth to cool the Earth’s surface.

However, all of these non-WWS “miracle” technologies result in greater global warming, air pollution, land degradation, and/or all three compared with WWS alone. Some of these technologies increase energy insecurity and/or take up to 23 years between planning and operation while costing substantially more than WWS technologies. As such, they are opportunity costs compared with investing in WWS, so are not recommended. This chapter discusses these non-WWS technologies and delineates the reasons why they are not needed or helpful for solving global warming, air pollution, and/or energy-security problems.