Wild Free and Happy Sample 42

[Note: This is the forty-second sample from the rough draft of my far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.]

SACRED ENERGY

Sunbeams

Alfred Crosby wrote a fascinating history of energy use.  There are two primary sources of energy, nuclear fusion from the core of the sun, and heat that rises up from the molten magma within the Earth.  Almost all of the energy used by the family of life traces back to the solar source.  Every day, the sun reliably provides clean energy for our planet, and it never sends us a bill.  Solar energy will very likely continue to be delivered for millions of years.  It is genuinely sustainable.

Energy arriving via incoming sunbeams is captured by the living solar panels built into a wide variety of green plants.  The solar panels contain chlorophyll, which uses sunbeam power to assemble simple carbohydrates by combining molecules of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water (H₂O).  This magic act is called photosynthesis, and it enables the existence of the entire family of life.  The carbs it produces include sugars, lignin, and cellulose.  They are used for the plant’s basic survival, growth, and reproduction.  Some plants store carbs for later use.  The byproduct emitted by photosynthesis is a gas called oxygen.

By a remarkable coincidence, living organisms called animals require both carbohydrates and oxygen in order to survive.  Animals burn (oxidize) carbs and release a byproduct called carbon dioxide, the gas that plants need to perform photosynthesis.  Animals consume food from plant and/or animal sources and use it for growth, reproduction, daily activities, and so on.  The portion of their food intake that’s not utilized is emitted in wastes called pee and poop, which are highly nutritious substances for plants.

Finally, all living plants and animals. sooner or later, become dead plants and animals, and dead stuff is a highly nutritious source of food for the recycling crew of wee beings.  They convert dead stuff into humus.  This organic matter sequesters essential nutrients and improves the fertility of topsoil, much to the delight of the entire family of life.  Under ideal conditions, the fertility and depth of topsoil can improve continuously for thousands of years.   

Ladies and gentlemen, please stand up and give an enthusiastic round of applause for the amazing magic of life — a brilliant, intricate, functional process that has been perfectly sustainable for several billion years, successfully rolling with the many powerful punches of change!  Hooray!  All lives matter!  All deaths matter!  The dance goes round and round.  Woo-hoo!  Big Mama Nature rocks!

Here’s something I didn’t know before.  Earth is an unusual planet, because its land surfaces include accumulations of carbon-rich organic matter, stuff left behind by the family of life.  This matter enables the possibility of fire.  Three things are needed for fire: oxygen, heat, and fuel.  A living forest can burn, and so can collections of dead dry stuff.  Crosby suspected that Earth might be the only planet where fire is possible.

Carboniferous Period

The family of life is sunbeam powered.  Soil organisms are children of the sun.  Plants and trees are children of the sun.  Everything that swims, flies, crawls, or walks is a sunbeam critter, including you and me.  Fossil energy is hydrocarbon compounds originally created by ancient sunbeams.

Coal is fossilized sunshine from tropical swamp forests that lived during the Carboniferous Period, which was roughly 360 to 300 million years ago, long before dinosaurs.  This fossil biomass accumulated over the course of 60 million years, largely in the vast swampy rainforests of Europe, Asia, and North America.  The rainforests absorbed sunshine and carbon, and used it to create carbon-rich biomass, via photosynthesis.

Today, tree trunks are roughly 1 part bark to 4 parts of wood.  During the Carboniferous, the trees trunks were more like 8 parts bark to 1 part of wood (up to 20 to 1).  Back then, there were no microorganisms capable of decomposing the lignin in the bark of dead trees, so nothing rotted for 60 million years.  The biomass in the rainforest swamps eventually became carbon-rich peat.  Over time, pressure and heat transformed the peat deposits into coal.  In some locations, coal beds are up to 39 feet thick (12 m). 

Because so much carbon was buried, there was far less of it in the atmosphere.  Consequently, the oxygen content in the air soared to 35 percent (now it’s 21 percent).  So, for the animals living in that oxygen-rich air, many things grew to giant proportions.  Dragonflies had wingspans of 29 inches (75 cm), and millipede-like bugs grew up to 9 feet long (2.7 m).  Some amphibians were almost 20 feet long (6 m). 

 Finally, the Carboniferous Period was brought to an end by climate change.  Wet and warm became cool and dry.  Glaciers grew, sea levels dropped, and many rainforest species went extinct, including most of the forests.  In the new climate, many reptiles adapted well, because the eggs they laid on land had shells that prevented the embryo from drying out.  Eventually, this enabled the emergence of the dinosaur era, which included the ancestors of modern birds.

It took many millions of years to transform the woody biomass into coal.  Over the passage of time, Big Mama Nature buried most of the sequestered carbon.  The family of life had no need for it.  So, the fossil sunshine took a long and pleasant nap.  Much later, when human miners rudely began drilling and blasting, the coal spirits were totally infuriated.  They cast malevolent spells against the screw-brained primates.  Their curses loaded the atmosphere with carbon, jerked the rug out from under a stable climate, and blindsided ecosystems everywhere.  Leave the coal where it is!

Jurassic Period

Petroleum and natural gas are buried sunshine that began in bodies of water during the Jurassic Period, the age of dinosaurs.  In those days, the climate was very warm, creating perfect conditions for teeny-tiny plants called phytoplankton that float around in oceans, seas, and lakes.  They absorbed Jurassic sunshine, and used it to create carbohydrates (their food), via photosynthesis. 

Today, phytoplankton are the most numerous organisms in oceans.  It is estimated that they comprise one percent of global biomass, yet most of them are too small to see with the naked eye.  They are the foundation of the oceanic food chain, and all sea life depends on them for survival.  Of all the photosynthesis performed on Earth, they do half of it.  They produce half of the oxygen in the atmosphere, the stuff you’re breathing now.  They asked me to tell you that they are really pissed off about the climate crisis and ocean acidification.  Leave the oil and gas where it is!

During the Jurassic, countless gazillions of these floating organisms lived happily.  When they died, they sank to the bottom.  In some locations, large deposits accumulated faster than the material could decompose.  These deposits formed between 260 and 10 million years ago.  Once they were buried under layers of sediment, heat and pressure stimulated chemical reactions.  Oil and gas were created when the deposits were cooked for millions of years at temperatures ranging from 180° to 280°F (82° to 137°C).  In many locations, large concentrations of these hydrocarbons (oil and gas) have survived to modern times.  (So, oil is not dinosaur juice, it is phytoplankton stew.)

It took 250 million years for the biomass to accumulate at the bottom of the sea, and additional millions to finish pressure cooking it into oil and gas.  During this extremely slow process, 90 tons of ancient biomass was transformed into oil from which one U.S. gallon of gasoline (3.8 l) could be refined.  Over the passage of time, Big Mama Nature deeply buried most of the sequestered carbon, because the family of life had no need for it.  The world continued to live happily, and the air remained fresh and clean.

Vicious Circle

Our hominin ancestors appeared maybe four million years ago.  Like all other animals, they needed food, air, and water to survive.  Plants made their own food via photosynthesis, so they needed sunbeams, air, and water. 

As mentioned earlier, the invention of the fire drill, and the domestication of fire was a major turning point in the human saga.  Our early hominin ancestors may have lived for a million years or more prior to fire making.  It wasn’t necessary for biological survival, but it eventually enabled civilizations to develop the deadly technology needed to destroy entire ecosystems, and destabilize the climate.  We do know that, sooner or later, our ancestors became seriously addicted to using fire.  At that point, they developed a never-ending interest in fuel — dried organic matter like grass, leaves, dung, peat, and wood. 

Fire enabled them to better defend themselves against man-eating carnivores, so fewer brothers and sisters became cat food.  It also enabled cooking, which sharply increased the number of potential food resources from which they could extract solar energy.  So their addiction to sunbeam energy now expanded beyond the food they ate, to the solar power stored in the fuels they burned.

Humans are walking sunbeams.  We absorb sunbeam energy when we eat nuts, berries, fruit, tubers, and other digestible plant substances.  We can’t acquire it by eating grass, but we can absorb it when we eat grass-loving herbivores.  We can encourage the expansion of their herds, and increase our food resources, by deliberately expanding herbivore habitat — grasslands.  This can be done via firestick farming or deforestation.  For humans, grasslands provide more food than deserts, wetlands, forests, or brushy scrub. 

Wild herbivores are far less likely to overgraze than are herds of domesticated livestock, because a herder’s wealth and status is based on the number of critters he owns, not the condition of the grassland.  More is better.  For this reason, herders also have a long history of aggressively exterminating the wild carnivores that also cherish their herds.  As mentioned earlier, some ecosystems have been reduced to wastelands when overgrazing leads to catastrophic erosion over time.

Cropland can produce far more food per unit of land than grazing land, so it was often expanded in regions that were suitable for agriculture.  The healthy community of wild vegetation was ripped off the face of the land, the soil was tilled, seeds were planted, and sunbeams nurtured a generous banquet of nutrients we could digest.

Like herding, agriculture also has a long history of degrading ecosystems over time, in a number of ways.  Each crop removes nutrients from the soil that are often not returned — nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other stuff.  When sunbeams heat up exposed soil, they stimulate microbial life that degrades the humus, causing precious carbon in the soil to float away as carbon dioxide.  This long term carbon loss is even greater when cropland was originally created via deforestation.  Wild forests and unmolested topsoil are two huge treasure chests of precious carbon.  In a later chapter, we’ll take a closer look at the serious harms and challenges related to agriculture today.

Once again, attentive readers will see that the hunter-gatherer way of life had far less impact on ecosystems.  It wasn’t consistently harmless, but it kept humans alive for 300,000 years, and our hominin ancestors for several million years.  In comparison, the lifespan of civilization will be more like a quick flash in the pan, a train wreck.  Prior to the dawn of herding and farming, the planet remained in far better condition than it is today. 

Human cleverness, motivated by good intentions, and handicapped by ecological ignorance, has spectacularly backfired — and this failure is not understood by billions of folks who know little or nothing about environmental history.  Catastrophe is invisible to them.  Their virtual reality headsets stream images of a high standard of living, wondrous prosperity, amazing genius.  Let’s go shopping!

Craig Dilworth described the ongoing rise and fall of civilizations as a vicious circle.  Clever innovation enabled folks to control and exploit more sunbeam energy, and this enabled population growth.  More mouths needed access to more sunbeams, which required more cleverness, and on and on.  It was a merry-go-round that kept spinning faster and faster, until it ran into solid limits to growth that cleverness could not sweep aside.  Then, the merry-go-round shifted into reverse, and the game got slower, simpler, and quieter.  Societies strangled by scarcity, or bulldozed by stronger outsiders, tumbled into the tar pits of oblivion, while new merry-go-rounds began spinning elsewhere.  What goes up must come down.

Albert Bartlett tirelessly preached that growth in population and resource consumption is undesirable, unwise, and unsustainable.  Therefore, the super-trendy buzzword “sustainable growth” is an oxymoron.  Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of educated people in the world are radicalized believers in an absurd oxymoron.  It’s like the neon sign in the tavern window, “Free Beer Tomorrow.”  Our obsession with perpetual growth is batshit crazy.  Luckily, ignorance is curable, in theory.

By removing the forests, and growing crops, orchards, and livestock, the incoming solar energy could generate far more digestible nutrients.  More nutrients enabled the survival of more primates, so more forests were converted into manmade nutrient factories, and the primate mob grew even more.  The trees cleared could be processed into many useful products.  The charcoal could be used to smelt ores, and produce metal tools.  Metal tools made it much easier to remove forests, build things, plow cropland, and kill enemies and other animals.  This merry-go-round of cleverness has never spun faster, with greater fury — a vicious circle indeed.

Muscle Power

Throughout the four million year era of hominins, muscle power has been a primary source of energy for doing stuff.  Muscle power is highly versatile, able to run on a variety of edible fuels — grains, beans, meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, roots, insects, and so on.  Clive Ponting noted that until 1800, about 75 percent of the mechanical energy needed to run civilization came from human muscles, and most of the rest was from animals (wind and water were minor sources). 

Prior to 1492, the indigenous Americans had enslaved zero extra-large beasts of burden (beside humans).  The grand cities of the Incas, Mayans, and Aztecs were built entirely with human labor.  Much human energy was used to create Egypt’s pyramids.  The Great Wall of China was constructed by one million workers, half of whom died in the process.  The Greek and Roman city states held large populations of slaves.  Slavery was common from the dawn of civilization until the nineteenth century, and so was forced labor for “free” peasants.

Pita Kelekna wrote that horses were wild and free until maybe 4000 B.C., when humans began enslaving them.  Wild horses had been popular large game for many thousands of years.  Several scholars have speculated that domestication probably saved horses from extinction.  You can only eat a horse once, but you can force it to perform heavy work month after month, year after year.  They could be used to pull stuff, haul loads, and carry riders.  Four legged slaves enabled a tremendous expansion of soil mining, forest mining, mineral mining, bloody empire building, and economic growth.  They helped unlock the gateway to industrial civilization.

Humans produce less muscle power than horses, but we need less feed, and can digest far more types of foods.  We have bodies and brains that allow us to perform a much wider variety of physical tasks.  People can travel across deserts, up rugged mountains, and through dense rainforests.  Horses are less adaptable to hot climates and arctic regions.  Each one requires five acres (2 ha) of good grassland, and the supply of good grassland is not infinite.

By 1900, the global population of humans had soared to about 1.5 billion, and the era of horse power was wearing out its welcome.  Eric Morris wrote a fascinating essay to help us remember life in the Peak Horse era.  The streets of big cities were jammed with horses, carriages, and wagons, squishing through a deep layer of manure and urine, past rotting horse carcasses, amidst dense clouds of flies and overpowering stench.  Cities were rapidly growing, as hordes immigrants moved in to enjoy miserable industrial jobs, while living in crowded, filthy, disease ridden slums.  Each horse emitted 15 to 30 pounds (7 to 14 kg) of manure daily — 3 to 4 million pounds (1.3 to 1.8 million kg) in New York City each day.

(To be continued…)

Wild Free and Happy Sample 07

[Note: This is the seventh sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 199 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Fire: Big Juju

Civilization would have never been possible without the domestication of a superpower we call fire.  Look around you, and eliminate everything you see or use that was directly or indirectly made possible by the combustion of coal, petroleum, wood, or natural gas.  For example: metal, concrete, plastic, glowing screens, internal combustion engines.  If you could magically eliminate everything enabled by fire-based processes, you’d immediately be sitting naked in a wilderness — except that your existence was also made possible by a fire-powered civilization.  You and I are fire children.

The original tool for kindling fire is called a fire drill.  Its spindle is a straight, pointed, dry wooden stick that is spun back and forth with the hands.  The tip of the spindle is inserted into a cone-shaped socket in a fireboard of dry wood.  Rapidly spinning the stick creates friction as it rubs into the fireboard’s socket, and eventually, if all goes well, a glowing ember comes into being.  The fireboard is then tilted to drop the ember into a fluffy wad of dry tinder.  The ember is gently blown on, forcing its heat into the tinder.  Finally, a wee flame emerges in a puff of smoke.  Success!

Tom Brown described a Native American legend about fire making.  One day, the Great Spirit gave people the “wisdom of whirling wood.”  The spindle was the male element, active and aggressive.  The fireboard was the female element, receiving the whirling spindle, and nurturing a glowing ember.  The ceremony was like two lovers passionately meeting, and giving birth to a powerful being.  The bundle of tinder was the Earth, which nurtured the new life into fullness.

The invention of the fire drill enabled our tropical primate ancestors to migrate into chilly non-tropical ecosystems, and eventually spread to all continents, even the arctic.  As hungry hominins, skilled at ambush hunting, moved into unknown lands, many species of megafauna gradually disappeared from the stage — millions and millions of animals.  Without fire magic, I expect that hominins would be absent in much of the world today — the regions having annual or permanent snowy seasons.  The Americas would maybe still be home to mastodons, wooly rhinos, sabertooth cats, and other beautiful wild giants.

The original hominin homeland, south of the equator in Africa, was a highly unlikely location for the emergence of civilizations.  Jared Diamond wrote that, of the crop plants domesticated in Africa, all originated north of the equator.  He added that no large herbivores suitable for domestication originally lived south of the equator in Africa — only the guinea fowl was enslaved in this region.  This implies that if we had never wandered out of our ancestral homeland, the planet might have remained unspoiled.

Anyway, some too-clever African ancestor succeeded in inventing the fire drill.  What if a hungry crocodile had dismembered this person ten minutes before the big discovery?  Would we have been likely to migrate out of Africa, and spread around the Earth?  Would the world of today be a civilization-free wilderness, home to fantastic numbers of animals?  Would London still be a vast ancient forest, home to hippos, elephants, giant deer, aurochs, and lions?  Would the Thames still thrash and splash with huge migrations of giant salmon?  Would a wee population of hominins still be chasing critters across the savannah — wild, free, and happy?

Types of Fire

Stephen Pyne, one of the world’s foremost experts on fire history, described three categories of fire.

(1) Natural fire is not ignited by humans.  Nature can start fires via lightning strikes, volcanoes, meteors, or falling rocks.  It rarely ignites when the temperature is cold, the ecosystem is moist, or where little or no fuel is present.  When conditions are ideal, these wild fires can quickly reduce large areas of forest or grassland to ashes.  This is perfectly normal and natural.  In regions where wildfires commonly occur, like America’s west coast, the vegetation consists of many species that are fire dependent or fire tolerant.  Some plants actually require fire to germinate their seeds.

(2) Anthropogenic fire is started by humans, deliberately or unintentionally.  It can be ignited in many different ways — fire drills, flint and steel, friction matches, electric sparks, machinery, power lines, chemical explosions, atomic bombs, and so on.  Until recent centuries, it primarily burned biomass fuels like wood, grass, or dung.

Unlike modern societies that burn fossil biomass imported from distant lands, preindustrial communities had firm limits on the firewood available nearby.  At its peak in A.D. 1050, the Native American civilization at Cahokia (near modern St. Louis) was home to 30,000 folks who cooked and heated with wood.  This was twice the number of folks living in London at the time, and London was Europe’s biggest city north of the Alps.

Cahokia’s homes were wood framed and thatched, and the palisade that surrounded the settlement was made of logs.  They had no carts, horses, or iron axes.  By 1250, it was a ghost town.  Did they run short of fuel, overhunt, deplete their topsoil, perish from warfare, experience a climate surprise, or all of the above?

Anthropogenic fire has been used extensively around the world to alter ecosystems, in order to make them more suitable for agriculture, herding, and wild game.  More on this subject later.

(3) Industrial fire is a more recent variation of anthropogenic fire.  Its primary fuel is associated with fossil biomass — coal, petroleum, and natural gas.  It can burn anywhere — in airplanes, ships, diamond mines, and skyscrapers.  It can burn on barren sand dunes, in soggy rainforests, or in the frozen arctic.  Industrial fire is often designed to burn automatically, like in a furnace or water heater.

Fossil biomass consists of enormous deposits of sequestered carbon.  Coal is rainforest vegetation that accumulated over the course of 60 million years.  Oil and natural gas come from dead phytoplankton that accumulated over 250 million years.  Combined, this is a one-time 310 million year stash of extremely high quality energy.  Industrial civilization is furiously burning this fuel on a huge scale, at an increasing rate.  Every day, the remaining fuel is further depleted, to support the survival of several billion humans who live like there’s no tomorrow.  What could possibly go wrong?

Pyne says that the civilization of our grandparents was limited by the amount of fossil fuel reserves remaining — eventually, the fuel gage would drop to Empty, and the party would end.  The current generation has a new and closer limit.  Before the needle ever hits Empty, the planet will become an ecological catastrophe.  The Big Burn is belching out far more harmful waste than our planet’s ecosystem can absorb.

The oceans are acidifying.  Carbon is building up in the atmosphere, resulting in rising temperatures and intensified storm systems.  Ice packs are melting, and sea levels are rising.  More than a billion people survive on food grown on cropland irrigated with water from melting snowpack and glaciers, which are shrinking.  Acid rain is hammering forests.  Millions of people are sick and dying from the perpetual haze of industrial air pollution.  And on and on.  Fire is powerful juju.  Wistfully modifying Smokey the Bear’s slogan, “Only you can prevent anthropogenic fire!”

Black Gold



Albert Marrin is a history professor who has written dozens books for young readers.  In Black Gold, he discussed the geology of fossil energy, emergence of the oil industry, geopolitics, oil wars, environmental impacts, and future challenges.  I was intrigued by his perspective on geopolitics.

Before World War One, the British navy scrapped many coal-burning warships and began building modern boats that ran on oil.  This gave them a big advantage over the German navy.  The era of industrial warfare had arrived.  Nations with tanks, trucks, and planes could easily smash horse-powered enemies.

America joined the war in 1917, and brought lots of oil.  German ports were blockaded, their war machine ran out of fuel, and they were defeated.  In this new era, for the first time, oil became essential for military success.  Young Hitler grasped this, and so did the British.  A primary objective of the Brits was to seize control of Middle Eastern oil, a yet-to-be developed treasure that made greedy gits giddy.  They succeeded, invented new nations, and found obedient puppets to rule them (and loot them).

Of course, wealth and power frequently turns decent people into obnoxious monsters.  Troublesome puppets were replaced with new ones, Britain got very rich, and the Arabs and Persians developed an intense hatred of Brits.  In World War Two, Hitler launched his oil-powered blitzkrieg, made a beeline for oily Baku, and planned to grab the Persian Gulf.  In this war, American oil once again came to the rescue.

Germany and Japan learned the hard way that running out of oil is for losers.  Everyone knows this today.  U.S. presidents have poured trillions of dollars into maintaining control of oil, whilst jabbering about freedom, democracy, and weapons of mass destruction.  For some mysterious reason, millions of Middle Eastern folks now loath and detest the U.S.

In Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabis are a sect that perceives most of modernity as pure evil.  They don’t look fondly on the lavish lifestyles of the ruling Saud family.  Marrin asserts that the government agreed to subsidize the spread of Wahhabi schools into other regions.  In exchange for this funding, the Wahhabis agreed not to make trouble in Arabia — but trouble anywhere else was OK.  “In short, Saudi oil profits fueled terrorism.”

Russia now controls much of the natural gas that powers Europe, and Western powers are eager for an alternative, a pipeline from the Middle East that bypasses Russian control.  It would be reasonable to conclude that the coming decades are not going to be a sweet celebration of love, peace, and happiness.  Expect big drama as the age of hydrocarbons swirls the drain, climate change pounds the luckless, and Big Mama Nature hurls overshoot overboard.

The rear end of Marrin’s book was annoying.  The book is intended for use in schools.  He recommends that the U.S. should become energy independent as soon as possible.  The best solution, he says, is a combination of fossil fuels and alternative energy — solar, wind, biomass, hydro, geothermal, nuclear (no mention of sharply reducing consumption).  The assumption is that independence is possible, and that the consumer way of life will be free to continue down the path of mindless self-destruction.

Teachers, librarians, and parents should have an above average understanding of energy issues before selecting books on the subject.  These issues are going to have a staggering impact on the lives of the target audience, young readers.  It’s long past time to sit down with youngsters and have a highly embarrassing birds-and-bees discussion about the fact that the abundant energy bubble is going to turn into a pumpkin during their lifetimes.  Preserving their ignorance seems cruel.

In the book, readers learn that nuclear reactors can generate lots of electricity, but they occasionally barf large amounts of radiation all over the place.  Therefore, it’s very important to properly dispose of spent fuel because it’s extremely toxic.  Great idea!  How?  William and Rosemary Alley discussed this issue in Too Hot to Touch.  They note that today “there are some 440 nuclear power plants in 31 countries.  More are on the way.  Yet, no country on Earth has an operating high-level waste disposal facility.”

Obama cancelled plans for the Yucca Mountain site, which was as close to perfect as is possible — after 25 years of research at a cost of $10 billion.  Because it was cancelled, spent fuel rods continue building up, many of them temporarily stored in cooling ponds.  If the circulating pumps for the cooling ponds stop, the water boils, the pool evaporates, and the rods are exposed to air, melt, and release radioactive gasses.  The meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were triggered by overheated fuel rods.

Readers also learn that the U.S. has huge coal reserves, enough for 250 years at the current rate of consumption.  To understand why this is a meaningless statement, watch one of the many versions of Albert Bartlett’s famous lecture, Arithmetic, Population, and Energy on YouTube.  Every student and teacher should watch it.

Read Jeff Rubin’s book, The Big Flatline.  You’ll learn that the production of top quality anthracite coal peaked in 1950, and grade B bituminous coal peaked in 1990.  There is abundant grade C coal, lignite, which is especially filthy to burn.  Since lignite is so low in energy, it cannot be shipped long distances profitably.  It is absurd to use 100 calories of diesel to haul 100 calories of low quality coal.

This is an extremely important issue — energy returned on energy invested (EROEI).  The book doesn’t mention this.  EROEI is also highly relevant to oil.  Rubin and others note that in the good old days of high-profit gushers, it was common to invest one calorie of energy to produce 100 calories of oil (100:1).  By 2010, typical EROEI was about 17:1, and some are predicting 5:1 by 2020.

Rising prices enable the extraction of difficult and expensive non-conventional oil and gas.  At some point, declining EROEI makes extraction pointless, regardless of market prices.  Consequently, most of the oil in Canadian tar sands will be left where it is.  The EROEI of tar sands now in production is about 3:1, and 5:1 for shale deposits.

Readers learn about renewable energy, like wind, solar, and hydro.  See Ted Trainer’s book, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society.  Learn about the significant shortcomings of the various types of alternative energy.  Discover why no combination of them will ever come anywhere close to replacing the energy now provided by fossil fuel.  Discover why we will not enjoy a smooth and painless transition to a sustainable, renewable energy future.

The education system, from grade schools to universities, seems to be largely committed to a “don’t scare the children” strategy.  We don’t want to fill kids with despair about their grisly inheritance.  Also, publishers want to avoid discussions that piss off poorly informed parents, or the politically powerful titans of industry.  The publisher did allow Marrin to drop hints that there might be some trouble in the future.  It’s a touchy game.  Sales can be harmed by too little reality, or too much.  The book’s takeaway message is that we have the solutions for our energy challenges, but we don’t have a lot of time to fool around.  Things will be OK, probably, maybe.  Is that likely?

Marrin, Albert, Black Gold: The Story of Oil in Our Lives, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012.