Life After Fossil Fuels

In 2020, Jeff Gibbs’ documentary Planet of the Humans fell out of the sky.  It aimed a spotlight on the many ways in which solar and wind power were neither green nor renewable — no free pony.  In response, many “green” activists explosively soiled their britches and demanded that the film be banned.  Millions watched it.  Similarly, in 2021, Derrick Jensen and team published Bright Green Lies, which was soon followed by a documentary based on the book.  

These two projects were righteous fire-breathing exposés of the deceptions regularly made by folks promoting “green” technologies.  Passionate preaching can often get some folks to listen.  Sometimes it inspires minds to change.  Other folks prefer to have deeper understanding before revising their views.  Alice Friedemann’s book, Life After Fossil Fuels, will appeal to them. 

Without rage and condemnation, she calmly and carefully described why she thinks we would be wise to end our addiction to fossil fuels as soon as possible.  She evaluated the alternatives, and concluded that most are not free ponies.  Importantly, she carefully explained the benefits, limits, and faults of the various options, and meticulously cited the sources of her information — literally hundreds of them. 

Readers are introduced to the notion that alternative energy is not the magic key to a sustainable utopian wonderland.  The status quo is a high speed, ridiculously luxurious, one-way path into dark and treacherous realms.  We’ve been living like scruffy back alley gods on drugs.  The good news here is that no “green” solution can permanently keep the massively destructive status quo on life support — it’s going to end up where it’s headed.  “We are nearing the end of a one-time binge.”  Indeed!

So, my eyes began tap-dancing across page 1, and I was soon scrolling through a thrilling 86-page joyride.  Friedemann presented an informative and embarrassing birds-and-bees discussion of the horrific unintended consequences of our childlike obsession with living like crazy dysfunctional grownups.  I cheered with excitement with each new chapter.  It was so refreshing to experience such a sumptuous feast of clear and coherent bullshit free information. 

Readers are introduced to the important notion of EROI (energy returned on energy invested).  Each year it’s taking more and more energy to find, extract, process, and distribute fossil energy.  Imagine having a job that paid $100 per day, but the bridge toll for getting to work was $99.  For this reason, enormous amounts of fossil energy will remain in the ground forever, thank goodness!  About 65 percent of buried oil is technically or economically unrecoverable. 

The fracking industry is drilling like crazy, while more and more unlucky tycoons land with a splat in the tar pits of bankruptcy.  The richest discoveries were drilled and drained first.  “Globally, new oil discoveries have fallen for 6 years, with consumption of oil six times greater than discoveries from 2013 through 2019.”  Trouble ahead. 

In manufacturing, would it be possible to eliminate fossil energy by switching to wood-based fuel?  Take a wild guess.  Can we continue producing mountains of food when energy-guzzling synthetic fertilizers have become fond memories of the good old days?  Can industrial agriculture continue when energy-guzzling farm equipment runs out of affordable fossil energy to guzzle?  Will high speed horse carts haul fresh California veggies to Minnesota?

Can industrial civilization exist without energy-guzzling fleets of ships, planes, trains, and trucks?  “In the U.S., trucks deliver 80% of goods over 4.1 million miles of roads, with 80% of towns completely dependent on trucks.”  Can transportation systems shift to electric power?  “A truck with a driving range of 600 miles needs a battery pack weighing 35,275 pounds and can carry just 10,000 pounds.”  Oh, and cold weather reduces driving range by 35%.

“All contraptions that produce electricity need high heat in their construction.  They all need cement made at 2600°F.”  There is no known way to make concrete with electricity.  Making steel for wind turbines requires 3100°F (1700°C).  “Solar panels require 2700° to 3600°F (1500° to 2000°C) of heat to transform silicon dioxide into metallurgical grade silicon.”  Nuke plants still on the drawing board, in theory, might be able to generate 1562°F (850°C), but this is not hot enough for making cement, steel, glass, and lots of other stuff.

Friedemann’s key question is: could life as we know it continue in an alternative energy future?  By chapter 13, all contestants for powering a happy sustainable future were rejected, except one — biomass.  Prior to the fossil fuel era, heavy industry was powered by charcoal made from dead trees.  Brazil is still making steel with rainforest charcoal. 

“Biomass is the only renewable energy source that can generate the high heat needed by industry to make cement, iron, steel, aluminum, trucks, computers, electronic equipment, ceramics, bricks, and machinery.  Biodiesel is the only renewable drop-in fuel that can keep heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships running.  Biomass, with a little help from hydropower, is the only renewable way to keep the electric grid up.”

Yikes!  This spooky paragraph sent a cold chill through my body.  Weird chapters followed.  I began to wonder if I had just wasted two entire days of the only life I may ever live.  But, by this point, I was aware that Friedemann had a whimsical side, so I kept reading, hoping for a sharp turn.  It came later.  Act two of the book was focused on contemplating how we could produce enough biomass to power industrial civilization, and prepare to feed the 3 billion additional folks expected for dinner in 2050.  Hope fiends will have a good cry.

Bummers obstructing the rise of a biomass utopia include climate change, freshwater scarcity, brutalized topsoil, and our addiction to countless fossil powered processes.  Turning biomass into a liquid fuel known as ethanol is idiotic.  Trucks can’t guzzle it, and it refuses to be pumped through pipelines.  It takes about as much energy to make a gallon as the finished gallon contains.  (Ethanol is a monster child fathered by gold plated government subsidies to Big Ag.) 

The bummer parade is long and unusual.  Make biodiesel with algae?  Make ethanol with seaweed, sorghum, or corn stalks?  Biodiesel could indeed replace oil-based diesel, if we were able to produce it in high volume.  This would require enormous amounts of cropland, and it would pummel the land as much as other types of agriculture.  If climate shifts blindside farm country, game over.

Bottom line: “The electric grid can not stay up without natural gas due to a lack of energy storage.  Transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing can not be electrified.  If transportation can not be electrified or run on Something Else, civilization as we know it ends.  Agriculture goes back to horses and human labor.”  When readers finally reach chapter 33 and slither across the finish line, their brains have been reduced to a bucketful of steaming glop.  It doesn’t look like we’re on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City.  The sky is full of flying monkeys.  What a book!

The pisser here is that this very important book is sold by a textbook publisher, and it’s very expensive.  It won’t be able to catch much of a ride on the wave of interest generated by Gibbs, Jensen, and others.  Its modest collegiate audience is mostly the well-dressed offspring of the idle rich, and desperate students who are massively in debt.  Non-billionaires may need to rob a gas station, or get a library card.

The bigger pisser is that 12 year olds don't already know this stuff.  Maybe it would be polite to inform youngsters about the challenging future they have inherited.  I hope that Friedemann is busy working on something like a Dick and Jane primer for school kids — an affordable, competent, un-redacted, easy to read, mind-expanding introduction to actual reality, warts and all.  Imagine that.

Friedemann, Alice, Life After Fossil Fuels, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2021.

NOTE TO ALL: Alice Friedemann has made THIS ENTIRE BOOK AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE on her website:
https://energyskeptic.com

Jeff Gibbs interview

 

The Life and Adventures of William Buckley



William Buckley was born in Cheshire, England in 1780.  He was trained to be a bricklayer, but the monotonous work bored him.  He joined the militia and was a soldier for four years.  Then, he met some scruffy lads, and got busted for receiving stolen property.  In 1803, he was rewarded for his mischief with a one-way nine-month pleasure cruise to a luxurious resort for white trash in Middle of Nowhere, Australia.  He never saw his family again.

It was not a high security penal colony, because fleeing into the vast wilderness was essentially suicide.  In just three months the prison routine got unbearably boring, and Buckley joined three other lads in a great escape.  One was shot by a guard, and the two others soon lost their courage and gave up.  Buckley was a stubborn cuss, not an obedient bootlicker.  He refused to surrender, bid farewell to his cowardly mates, and abandoned the British Empire.  Good luck Willy!

A mile or two later, in an incredible act, he passed through a time warp, and entered a vast Stone Age wilderness inhabited by cannibals, venomous snakes, and vicious packs of dingo dogs.  He was free as can be, suddenly a clueless unarmed hunter-gatherer in a reality quite similar to 40,000 B.C.  For the next 32 years, he never saw a civilized person, forgot his mother tongue, ceased knowing what year it was, and continuously worked to improve his survival skills.  Fresh air, sunshine, and absolute freedom.  Imagine that!  His escape inspires pleasant fantasies for daydreaming corporate inmates trapped in cubicle farm workstations.

In the next several months, Buckley ate shellfish and occasionally observed a few passing natives.  One day he stumbled upon a grave with a spear sticking out of it — Lucky Willy’s salvation.  He took the spear, and used it for a walking stick.  Later, while having a pleasant nap, he was spotted by two native women, who returned to their camp with wondrous news of a white man.  Everyone came to see him, and he was given the name Murrangurk, the name of the corpse in the grave, previous owner of the spear.  They believe that after death, souls return as white men.  They were very happy to find him, and Willy now had relatives who held him in great awe.

Over time, he mastered their language.  He learned a great deal about hunting, fishing, and foraging.  He now dined on organic swans, emus, shellfish, shrimp, opossums, squirrels, large ants, roots, wombats, kangaroos, black snakes, grubs, lizards, toads, rats, and mice.  Yum!  Technology included long spears, short spears, spear throwers, boomerangs, tomahawks, shrimp nets, and fire-making sticks.  Their portable mansions were bark tents.  They weren’t too interested in clothing, fashionable folks wore a few strips of hide.

His saga often mentions seeing gatherings of 100, 200, and 300 natives, which surprised me.  My minimal knowledge of Aborigines, based on twentieth century commentaries, led me to believe that they lived in small groups in a harsh land where food was scarce.  Buckley indicated that they were intimately attuned to the cycles of the seasons, knowing when and where abundant food was likely to be found, for a temporary span of time.  They lived a wandering life, trying to move from one food banquet to the next, improvising along the way.

Buckley arrived in Australia in 1803, just one year after the first non-Australian arrived in the wilderness.  Willy spent 32 years with the Wathaurong Aborigines in the Port Phillip and Geelong districts (near Melbourne), and then made contact with sailors in 1835.  In about 1849, as he neared the end of his life, he told his story to impoverished journalist John Morgan.  Buckley could not read or write.  The saga he told was based entirely on memory, long after the events occurred.  He especially remembered the events that had made the deepest impressions on him — conflict and bloodshed.

Throughout the short book, he describes numerous violent events.  Many folks were speared to death, and many of their corpses were eaten.  Very often, women were the cause of bloody disputes.  These conflicts were commonly resolved by spearing the woman, or the man who was with her, who was not her husband.  Whenever someone was speared, the family of the victim was obliged to seek revenge, immediately, or at a convenient opportunity in the future.  If the chief offender was not available, a member of his family would do.  Sometimes two tribes clashed in large rumbles, and several died in the process.

Buckley reported that all deaths were believed to be the result of human agency, never natural causes.  For example, when a man from an enemy tribe died from a snakebite, Buckley’s tribal brother-in-law was suspected of sorcery or something.  The enemies attacked and speared the family that had kindly adopted him.  Buckley became an orphan in a dangerous world, and he cried and cried for hours.

He felt safe and relaxed when living alone by a river or shore, but dangerous people could suddenly appear at any hour.  Any day he could become the main course at dinner.  One white man who met him later in life said he was of “a nervous and irritable disposition, and a little thing will annoy him much.”  Another noted that he “was always discontented and dissatisfied.”

His wild days ended when he met some sailors on the shore.  They were utterly surprised to see a dirty, nearly naked, six foot five inch (2 m) white man with long flowing hair, and a spear.  It took him some time to remember English.  He was greatly relieved to return to civilized society.  He worked as an interpreter for colonists.  Their mission was to meet native chiefs, and buy their land for a pile of trinkets.  The natives had no chiefs, and no concept of owning land or selling it, but they did have a fondness for blankets, knives, and stuff.  They did not understand what these transactions actually meant.

Buckley the bricklayer built the chimney for the first brick house in a primitive frontier settlement now known as Melbourne.  Before long, a steady stream of ships was unloading settlers.  Pissed off natives found exciting new opportunities in sheep rustling, looting, and spearing terrorists.  There were many conflicts, and the well-armed terrorists eventually conquered the Aborigines, and profitably began mining the soil, grassland, forests, and wildlife.  Buckley married the widow of a friend who had been speared.  Soon after, he got typhus.  In 1856, he died of injuries received from being run over by an ox cart in Hobart.  The end.

This is a short book, and Morgan was not a master wordsmith.  The book is a unique snapshot of a time, a place, and a life — a reminder of the era of low impact living.  It’s an effective antidote for those who suffer from the illusion that wild tribes of hunter-gatherers universally enjoyed idyllic lives of love, peace, and happiness.  It’s also sad. 

Today, two centuries later, the wild ecosystem of 1803 has been severely and permanently damaged.  This is not a path with a long future.  The Aboriginal path very closely resembled genuine sustainability.  All paths include some conflict and bloodshed, some coherence and happiness.  We live in interesting times.

Morgan, John, The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, 1852, Reprint, William Heinemann Ltd, Melbourne, 1967.