Revised 3 December 2025


According to Wikipedia:


"In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and "wicked" denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil. Another definition is "a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point". Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems."


After 200 years of unabated growth in population and consumption per capita enabled by burning fossil fuels, we now face a wicked problem which has no easy solution. Burning of fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases which accumulate in the atmosphere resulting in global warming. We now need to immediately reduce our use of fossil fuels so as to avoid an irreversible runaway cascade of global warming leading to a hot-house Earth. A major proportion of our remaining fossil fuels must stay in the ground to avoid the potential extinction of all species on Earth.    


Our industrial societies are totally reliant on the use of high-grade energy for survival and we should have transitioned from fossil fuels to renewable energy when only 10% of our endowment of fossil fuel reserves had been consumed, but we ignored Limits to Growth warnings some 50 years ago about the possibility of our current predicament. The need to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy now involves massive investment in new plant and infrastructure which requires continued burning of fossil fuels because renewables alone cannot immediately produce more renewables. We need to stay within a limited carbon budget during a transition from fossil fuels to renewables and we can do this by diverting use of fossil fuels from unnecessary and frivolous consumption to investments in renewables while still reducing our use of fossil fuels each year. We also now confront a double whammy. The low hanging fruit of fossil fuel reserves with a high Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI) have already been exploited and the EROI of mining for all forms of fossil fuels inevitably decline to a level when it takes as much energy to mine for fossil fuels as the energy contained in the fossil fuel which is mined. By this time the EROI ratio is equal to 1.0 and net energy is zero. The annual rate of fossil  fuels extracted from a reserve in the ground eventually peaks and then declines. The annual supply rate of of conventional oil has already peaked. The longer we delay a transition from fossil fuels to renewables, the more difficult it will be to make a smooth if any transition. 


What further complicates the choice of pathways we should adopt during a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the uncertainty as to what level of technology human settlements will be able to utilise in 50 years’ time and beyond. There are strong indications that renewable energy will be unable to provide the same scale of energy per capita that we currently enjoy in the well-developed countries. Photovoltaic panels and wind turbines require the use of increasingly scarce minerals which in turn takes increasingly more energy to mine. We have already mined the low hanging fruit of minerals which were highly concentrated.


Future generations will have fewer energy slaves to work for them, and their life styles will be much simpler. Their quality of life, however, will not necessarily be lower than what we currently enjoy. We will need to learn how to live well on a much-reduced budget of energy during and after a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and infrastructure. It is possible to do this because much of our current consumption of energy in the form of goods and services does not necessarily lead to greater well-being. It is as supportive localised communities that we can continue to thrive.