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While cutting emissions is necessary to curb global warming, some renewable and clean energy sources use more water than fossil fuel-powered plants, finds a report released this week by the US Department of Energy (DoE) that looked at how resilient the US's power infrastructure is to climate change.

On the way to building the sustainable world, transition engineers respond to risks, not disasters. Transition engineering will emerge as the way by which society reduces both fossil fuel use and the detrimental social and environmental impacts of industrialization.

Carbon capture and storage remains a nascent technology: no one has yet proved that an integrated process can work on a commercial scale. But the US, Canada, Australia, the European Union and others have pledged billions of dollars to back demonstration projects. This suggests commercial deployment could be possible around 2020.Even so, any transition to carbon-free generation will take decades. Low-carbon technologies are generally more expensive than fossil-fuel plants: some, such as offshore wind, are a lot more expensive. And with wind, power generation will not be constantly available. Britain, which is backing Europe's fastest expansion of wind power, is building into its plans for 2030 a huge margin of spare generation capacity which can be used when there is no wind.

The Report Report is a periodic article produced by Corporate Eco Forum, a by-invitation membership organization comprised of large, global companies that demonstrate a serious commitment at the senior executive level to sustainability as a business strategy issue.

The mining industry faces an interesting paradox. It is the lynchpin of the transition to a low-carbon economy, providing the materials that go into new grids and electric vehicles, yet miners’ extraction processes gorge on large amounts of power. Miners account for 6% of the world’s energy demand, and meet most of it with fossil fuels.

Miners, which account for 22% of global industrial emissions, are facing more pressure to decarbonize than ever before – from investors, customers in the technology and auto industries, and even consumers further downstream.