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Fossil fuel divestment or fossil fuel divestment and investment in climate solutions is an attempt to reduce climate change by exerting social, political, and economic pressure for the institutional divestment of assets including stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments connected to companies involved in extracting fossil fuels.
From ancient times, people suspected that the climate of a region could change over the course of centuries. For example, Theophrastus, a pupil of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC, told how the draining of marshes had made a particular locality more susceptible to freezing, and speculated that lands became warmer when the clearing of forests exposed them to sunlight.
Fossil fuels were rapidly adopted during the Industrial Revolution, because they were more concentrated and flexible than traditional energy sources, such as water power. They have become a pivotal part of our contemporary society, with most countries in the world burning fossil fuels in order to produce power, but are falling out of favor due ...
Oil field in California, 1938. The modern history of petroleum began in the nineteenth century with the refining of paraffin from crude oil. The Scottish chemist James Young in 1847 noticed a natural petroleum seepage in the Riddings colliery at Alfreton, Derbyshire from which he distilled a light thin oil suitable for use as lamp oil, at the same time obtaining a thicker oil suitable for ...
Natural gas burning on a gas stove Burning of natural gas coming out of the ground. Natural gas (also called fossil gas, methane gas, or simply gas) is a naturally occurring mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons consisting primarily of methane (95%) [1] in addition to various smaller amounts of other higher alkanes.
On 1 June 1943, the Army created the Fuels and Lubricants Division of the Quartermaster Corps, and, from their records, they tabulated that the Army (excluding fuels and lubricants for aircraft) purchased over 9.1 billion liters (2.4 × 10 ^ 9 U.S. gal) of gasoline for delivery to overseas theaters between 1 June 1943 through August 1945.
With the dawning of the so-called Atomic Age many observers in the mid-20th century believed that the Oil Age was rapidly coming to an end. [10] The rapid change to atomic power envisioned during this period never materialized, in part due to environmental fears following high-profile accidents such as the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the 2011 Fukushima ...
Interest in gasoline-like fuels started with the invention of internal combustion engines suitable for use in transportation applications. The so-called Otto engines were developed in Germany during the last quarter of the 19th century. The fuel for these early engines was a relatively volatile hydrocarbon obtained from coal gas.