Coal..................

      Greentech in its current form simply isn't mature enough or cheap enough to move the needle for most people in most locations.  It is largely limited to developed countries with rich capital supplies who just coincidentally happen to have large population centers fairly close to sunny or windy locations.  The southwest quarter of the United States looks great, as do the American Great Plains, Australia, and the coasts of the North Sea

     Nearly all other locations will remain dependent upon more traditional fuels for the vast majority of their energy needs.  This is far worse than it sounds from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions because the vast majority of these locations will not be able to retain access to internationally traded oil and gas, either.  If they cannot source oil or natural gas and their geographies do not enable sufficient use of sun and wind, they will have a simple decision to make.  Option A is to do without the products that have enabled humanity to advance for the past two centuries, to suffer catastrophic reductions in product access and food productions, triggering massive downward revisions in standards of living and population. To go without electricity. To deindustrialize. To decivilize. 

     Or—Option B—to use one fuel source that nearly all countries have locally: coal.  Many particularly unlucky people will be stuck with something called lignite, a barely-qualifies-as-coal fuel that is typically one-fifth water by weight and is by far the least efficient and dirtiest fuel in use today.  Germany already today uses lignite as its primary power input fuel because Greentech is so woefully unapplicable to the German geography, and yet the Germans—for environmental reasons—have shut down most of their other power-generation options.

     As a planet, we are perfectly capable of suffering broad-scale economic collapse and vastly increasing our carbon emissions at the same time.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization.