hardest-to-get-at bits are ultimately simply left behind. There is no point in outfitting a whaling ship to go catch the very last couple of whales left alive; nor is there a way to keep pipelines, oil terminals, tankers, refineries and gas
stations running for the sake of that last little dribble of oil from the last few oil wells. The bits that are left behind are
usually of lower quality, size and
density, in difficult locations, and thus require the most energy and resources to access.
The main liquid fuel in the mid-19th century was whale oil. Harvests of blubber (and whale bone, which, ground into bone meal, was used as fertilizer) formed something like a Gaussian distribution over time (shown in this chart). Late in the 19th century a substitute for whale oil as lamp fuel was found in kerosene, distilled crude oil. Eventually, substitutes were found for all the other whale-based products save one: ambergris, a strange, smelly substance from sperm whale intestines used in making perfumes 167 (which is an odd reason to kill a whale). But by then all the easy-to-find whales had already been killed and their blubber rendered into oil. ( It is no coincidence that “right whales” are still endangered; they were considered the “right” whales to catch due to their slow swimming, the fact that they floated when dead, and their high blubber yields. 168 ) Higher prices can provide an incentive to access more costly bits of NNRs, but do not forestall their depletion. TaaL: My breath is once again taken away by the historical reference to whales as an energy resource: right whales have brains far larger than humans, live far longer, and have been self-aware far longer than you humans. But because they are alien to you , and thus only valuable for their constituent parts, the songs of right whales are now very lonely. It can make sense – even to humans – to set aside a portion of a renewable resource so there’s some available every year. But this runs afoul of your “money” madness as it relates to growth. If a “renewable” resource like whales have a slower reproduction rate than the interest offered on money investments, it “makes sense” under economic logic to wipe out the species entirely and just bank the money gained thereby, since the money
267
Powered by FlippingBook