When we focus on producing alternatives to our current fossil energy-centric society - like solar panels and other renewable electricity - we often forget to look at the mundane and problematic basics of our modern global infrastructure: steel, glass, concrete, plastics, petrochemicals, medicines, etc. The challenge in a 21 st century, faced with lower-quality and costlier hydrocarbons (as well as carbon compounds that must remain unburned for ecological reasons), is that many of the heavy industrial processes underpinning our world economies cannot be easily replaced with electric substitutes. And we often forget: the non-fuel uses of fossil hydrocarbons may be their highest and most important use. TaaL: Indeed. Crude oil can be converted into a wonderful array of materials and substances, from sterile medical plastics to lubricants. If you hadn’t found it in such quantities, “burning it up” might not have seemed like the smartest thing to do with it. Inasmuch as the oil now available is all that you humans will have to work with in the coming million years, perhaps those future people would appreciate sterile medical plastics (and the accompanying lower death rates, as well). Rather than filling your landfills and oceans with throw-away plastics, they could be treated with respect as the wondrous materials they are and set aside so your progeny might see some. Of course, that’s not what’s happening; as things are now proceeding, your progeny may drink from gourds and earthenware – and the occasional recovered Smucker’s jar - much as people did millennia ago, and die from sepsis after minor surgery. They need not. You folks are treating oil like you treated herds of buffalo, seas of whales, and flocks of passenger pigeons: as something to be quickly used up on general principles. Why?
The Bottom Line: Solar panels are cool, but most things we (currently) do can’t be done and scaled affordably with electricity.
300
Powered by FlippingBook