If you want an image of where the internal contradictions of the fossil fuel economy are headed as disruptive clean energy and a warming planet transform the 21st century, consider Kuwait.
The first real boomtown of the 1960s Arab oil rush, its people have a richer endowment of crude than any other nation on earth. The 101.5 billion barrels of reserves are equivalent to about 23,000 barrels for every resident — more than double the next-placed country. At current prices, this geological inheritance works out at about $4.3 million per citizen.
And yet Kuwait is struggling to keep the lights on. In what was for decades one of the richest countries on the planet, rolling power outages have become a fact of life over the past two summers.
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