by Real History Lisa
Mon Jul 12th, 2010 at 01:02:18 PM EST
We should have listened to Nikola Tesla when we had the chance.
At the height of his popularity as the key inventor who pioneered commercial electricity, Tesla cautioned the world of the inefficiencies of burning substances to generate energy, especially coal, the predominate fuel source of the day.
Not only did the burning process waste most the potential energy of coal, Nikola Tesla argued, but it was a nonrenewable resource that we would eventually run out of. The same arguments could easily be made about oil.
"Whatever our resources of primary energy may be in the future," Tesla wrote in Century Magazine in 1900, "we must, to be rational, obtain it without consumption of any material."
