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Information on Energy cannibalism can be found at Wikipedia. What's this?

As the unacceptable results of continued fossil fuel combustion on climate change become ever clearer, a need to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by aggressive energy conservation and immediate transitioning of global civilizations to alternative energy sources has become evident. Many energy technologies are capable replacing significant volumes of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, neither the enormous scale of the current fossil fuel energy system nor the necessary growth rate of these technologies is well understood within the limits imposed by the net energy produced for a growing industry.

This technical limitation is known as energy cannibalism and refers to an effect where rapid growth of an entire energy producing or energy efficiency industry creates a need for energy that uses (or cannibalizes) the energy of existing power plants or production plants.

Thus during rapid growth, the industry as a whole produces no net energy because new energy (or conserved energy) is used to fuel the [embodied energy] of future power plants or production facilities. Such life cycle analysis is also valid for GHG emissions. All current technologies are dependent to some degree on fossil fuel energy and thus also contribute to emissions.

Recent work expands earlier work to generalize the GHG emission neutral growth rate limitation imposed by energy cannibalism to any renewable energy technology or any energy efficiency technology ^[1].