11-21-2022
On this week of Thanksgiving 2022, I’d like to express my gratitude for fossil fuels. Everything about my comfortable life is thanks to fossil fuels - my shelter, my heat, my food, my electricity, my transportation, my clothing and outdoor equipment, my computer and mobile devices, the cellular network, the satellite network, indeed, almost every component of our infrastructure and agricultural systems are thanks entirely or largely to fossil fuels.
We humans have been granted this great gift of energy by millions of years of plant life that decayed into the oil, gas, and coal products that we now consume voraciously. Current estimates of global fossil fuel energy consumption hover around 500 exajoules per year (1 exajoule is roughly equivalent to 174 million barrels of oil; 1 exajoule = 1 quintillion joules). For comparison, the magnitude 9.1 earthquake that rocked Japan and caused the devastating tsunami in 2011, produced 1.4 exajoules of energy; so 500 exajoules of consumption is staggering beyond conception.
Current estimates indicate that at this consumption rate, there are about 50 years of fossil fuel deposits left on Earth. In 50 years, I’ll be gone, and while I have chosen not to have children, my contemporaries’ kids, grandkids, and great grandkids will be here, and things are lining up for our future generations to face hardships that nobody since the Industrial Revolution has had to face.
In a very real sense, all of humanity is living on borrowed time. Time borrowed from the millions of years of life that preceded us on this planet. We cannot replicate fossil fuel production in the lab, we cannot renew this finite energy boon. If it weren’t for fossil fuels, we’d have long ago extirpated whale populations for their oil and forests for their fuelwood. But now we’re coming up against our borrowed time and we are grossly indebting our kids and grandkids - not just with the burden of solving the energy crisis, but also with the burden of solving the environmental crisis of global warming.
I am profoundly thankful for the fossil fuels that have enabled the explosion of industry, infrastructure, and technology that make our lives better, and in many ways, easy. I am profoundly thankful for the people who go to work in often inhospitable environments to provide this energy boon to the rest of us.
It is because of these great gifts - the resource itself and the hard work of those who produce it - that I believe we need to come to a reckoning about our decadent wastefulness with fossil fuels. One image that comes to mind is of the guy driving the jacked-up pickup truck purposely modified to billow black smoke out the tailpipe. We’ve all seen that guy. Don’t be that guy.
Besides refraining from modifying your vehicle to be less efficient and more polluting, there are a lot of things we can do everyday to start conserving fossil fuels, that wonderful energy boon that has been gifted to us by millions of years of life on this planet. Perhaps the single greatest thing we can do is to reduce our consumption of red meat. Modern red meat production is one of the least efficient food models in human history, and one of the unhealthiest for consumers. I’m not suggesting that we all go vegetarian/vegan - I’m neither and doubt I ever will be, but I’m proud to say that my diet is about 80% plant-based, supplemented with meat - mostly wild-caught fish, and less often, poultry, pork/ham/bacon, and free-range bison (yes, fossil fuels are needed under current systems to produce these meats and transport them to me).
Again, I acknowledge my own dependence on fossil fuels to maintain my quality of life. What I would ask us all to consider is, how can we best conserve and utilize the fossil fuels that are left? What habits can we develop to reduce our extraordinary waste of fossil fuels? What culture can we develop to consume and conserve fossil fuels at the same time? What priorities should we devote the remaining fossil fuels to? Should we consume all economically-viable fossil fuels? Or would it be better to leave some fossil fuels in the ground? Do we possess the maturity to wean ourselves off fossil fuels sooner than later? Will we decide when to kick the fossil fuel habit? Or will that decision be made for us?
If it were up to me, here would be a few of my top priorities to devote our continued fossil fuel development to:
renewable energy infrastructure
agricultural infrastructure
alternative fuel engine technology
military and federal civilian reserves of fossil fuels
Why we haven’t gotten more aggressive with any of these efforts is beyond me.
For this week of Thanksgiving, I’d like to close by saying THANK YOU for humankind’s great energy gift of fossil fuels, THANK YOU to the people who produce those fossil fuels for the rest of us, THANK YOU to those who strive to reduce fossil fuel consumption and waste, and THANK YOU to those who strive to develop alternative energy systems and technologies.