TaaL : Natural gas is often a byproduct of drilling for oil. And since there are no pipelines to take it to your plastics factories or power plants, most oil- excavating operations simply “flare” it... burn it as it comes out of the ground, as in the picture at the beginning of this section, to convert it to CO2 and water. These flames can be seen from space (compare sparsely populated Bakken Shale night image to Minneapolis). This is far better for your overheating biosphere than letting it escape unburned (since emitted CO2 has lower climate impact than emitted CH4), but it’s clearly a waste of energy; a legion of eternal flames to memorialize what you’ve decided to trade away; fossil slaves tap-dancing in place for no particular reason. Of course, natural gas contains no energy. I’ve visited Saturn’s enormous moon Titan and seen the cryonic lakes of methane and hydrocarbons there, but there’s no energy to be found. Rather, it’s burning things within the Earth’s constantly -life-renewed oxygen atmosphere which supplies the energy. (Think about it: that means the “stored sunlight energy” you’re using to run your industries is at most 2000 or so years old, and not really hundreds of millions 112 ). It’s merely a human convention that methane and other flammable fos sils “contain energy,” since you take the oxygen for
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