The conundrum in our time when we have a burgeoning population needing resources of energy to sustain itself is that we have been and still are using fossil fuels to produce 80 percent plus of the required energy. This is the cause of a CO2 overload in our atmosphere that in turn is the cause of our rapidly warming planet. We can’t be eight billion people who survive and thrive using a fossil-fuel growth economy because the consequences result in CO2 overload and climate apocalypse. As the current CO2 growth trajectory continues to a true extinction event there will be signposts along the way that people will see: sever storms increasing in overall numbers and intensity; more and larger wildfires, spreading drought, sea level rise, flooding events, ice caps melting rapidly, glaciers retreating, and so on. At some point survival actions will be taken. Human history suggests that instead of people and governments coming together to limit and reduce CO2 to stop the warming, there will be attempts to exploit the situation through military conflict to gain an advantage over others. War itself will lead to reductions to the global population, and consequently provide a window where demand supported by fossil fuels will slow. War is a risky strategy to effect change, but humans are ingrained to favor short-term risk taking over a more prolonged exercise of constraint in living with less, cooperation across competing factions, consolidation of policy, and consensus toward building a new economic model using sustainable fuels.