Digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight

For two hundred years, human economic activity has largely consisted of digging up fossil fuels and setting them alight, and while two hundred years seems like a long time to us, in geological terms it’s like a bat out of… well, out of hell. We’re currently injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ten times faster than during the End-Permiasn, which was, just to repeat, the worst event in the earth’s history.

— Bill McKibben, 2019

From the book Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?