Think of fossil fuels that go into mining and smelting, manufacturing, transporting, and assembling a wind turbine before it starts pumping ‘clean’ electricity into the grid, and you begin to glimpse just how deeply wedded even the most ambitious plans for the future are implicated in the energy of the past.

But that’s the grand irony: countries will go to war to decide who owns the hydrocarbons and then countries gather to decide who does not own the carbon dioxide.

How differently would we see our time on Earth if we wrote the date as January 26, 4.543 billion?

The iron that makes our blood red was made in the final moments before a star died. For all of us, then, our very lifeblood began with a spectacular death in a solar system.