https://medium.com/future-crunch/homo-electric-and-the-trillion-dollar-time-trial-9ae2e4fb23ee

If you’ve spent any time reading space opera, you’ll be familiar with the moment when someone from an advanced civilisation arrives on a distant planet, and discovers that its inhabitants are using hydrocarbons as their primary energy source. Our genetically engineered, wisecracking heroine is suitably appalled or amused.

Getting most of your energy by setting black rocks on fire and blowing up dinosaur juice is, quite clearly, the behaviour of a backwards and savage people. It’s dirty and it’s dangerous. If intelligent life can invent internal combustion engines, then it’s also prescient enough to know that burning carbon will create a greenhouse effect and ruin the environmental conditions that allowed it to flourish in the first place. In order for a planetary society to advance, at some point it has to undergo a transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. A systemic change that is both driven by and drives technological innovation, forges new political and economic systems and operates on a whole new scale.