🔋Fossil Fuels Are Here To Stay
Even with the goal to reduce emissions, without ready and capable replacements, rapidly eliminating fossil fuels is dangerous and lowers the world's standard of living.
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Energy in all forms is a fundamental building block to modern society. It is also a bridge or ‘life force’ for human innovation as I wrote before. Since energy is so important, I think maintaining/increasing the generation of it is also important. If a more prosperous future is a goal, we need to keep innovating. To do this we need an abundance of energy that allows the society as a whole to think more about productive things other than fulfilling their basic needs of heat, cooling, food, water, sanitation, etc. In fact, climate change is the ultimate first world problem and is hardly a concern in countries with low human development index (aka third world countries). For example, we are seeing right now a lot of industry being shut down across Europe and people buying firewood/food as they are worried about heating homes and getting through the winter. As a consequence, not only are wealthy European countries taking away higher cost resources (natural gas, coal, wood, etc.) from poorer countries, it lowers the productive ability of Europe as they are focused on lower tier* issues.
Furthermore, as a species if we plan to keep progressing and not re-enter another dark age like our ancestors, or at least not regress in our ability to produce things and live the quality of life we currently enjoy, energy security is a priority. This is to maintain basics like adequate food supply, home and building infrastructure, and temperature control. Innovations in energy production, storage, and transportation has caused human civilization to get to this point. Even with the environmental problems caused by fossil fuels, they are axiomatic to the prosperity and well-being of people globally. We shall literally dispense with energy at our own peril if we don’t only sufficiently replace the energy consumption in a reasonably cheap fashion, but continue to produce more energy to keep growing.
Renewables only account for a 12% of the total energy consumption while nuclear is 8% as of 2021. Clearly, getting rid of fossil fuels which comprise of 79% of energy consumption in the US (2021) would be a large task. That’s why there are so many government programs and private initiatives to build out renewables infrastructure. There are lots of people working diligently to reduce this percentage.
However, to maintain the standard of living we currently possess, we rely heavily on petroleum products and the technologies that rely on fossil fuels. Even if we were to unleash emission free electricity and heating/cooling, that would only encompass 38% of necessary emissions. The transpiration sector could theoretically be reduced significantly by battery power. Industrial processes are more efficiently run on fossil fuels than they are on electricity which pose a challenge. Agriculture emissions are a necessary “evil” because of the necessity of food and fertilizer production, therefore difficult to replace.
Other than the large scale sectors I just mentioned, fossil fuels are responsible for some of the most important things in the world including air travel, the Haber-Bosch process, plastics, rubber/tires, cement and steel production, heavy machinery, petrochemicals, and an endless array of day-to-day products. All of these things have no direct replacements, at least without significant process development. There are still significant challenges to overcome with producing large scale alternative fuels, bioplastics, and organic farming/fertilizers for example. If the revolutionary Haber-Bosch process didn’t exist it would take ~4x more land to produce the food we need today and many of us would likely not be here. Mining, material extraction, and material processing are reliant on fossil fuels and would be extremely challenging to use battery equipment and electricity power for all of this, let alone the environmental footprint tradeoff of large scale mining. List of current processes reliant on fossil fuels [1, 2, 3].
Furthermore, people are better able to survive natural disasters and environmental uncertainty with greater wealth. Fossil fuels as a proxy for cheap energy have undoubtedly led to increased wealth from the countries who have pursued it. The GDP vs total fossil fuel consumption graph shows a very tight correlation.
Global deaths from disasters have reduced by an extreme measure over the last 100 years. Even the issues seen in recent years lean more toward poorer countries who are unable to adequately ensure primary resources of infrastructure, heating, food, etc. Fossil fuels are a large factor in the wealth and infrastructure creation for much of the world to get better at surviving nature.
My goal with this piece is to highlight the challenges with getting rid of 100% of fossil fuels. That is unrealistic, even for generations down the line in my opinion. While most people do not think that we should get rid of 100% of fossil fuels, rapidly eliminating fossil fuel use is one of the largest priorities of major nations around the world. Understanding the consequences of such a plan are important to consider, even if we agree that is a good way to reduce emissions. Demonizing fossil fuels is a dangerous and disasters strategy without proper replacements available. Society would not function to the same standards as it does today and it would be more difficult to further innovate with a drastically lower energy consumption.
We are seeing right now Germany and others struggling with their renewable energy fleet, mass oil and gas shortages from lack of investment in new production, and looming food crisis/shortages from low supply and high cost of fertilizers. The way the world gets to reduced emissions from here is very important, and current progress has not been very successful. We will never get rid of fossil fuels, nor do we want to rapidly eliminate them, especially not before the replacement infrastructure is ready. That’s why much of the accelerated effort to reduce fossil fuels use is dangerous and already causing global catastrophes.
-Grayson
*lower tier here refers to the tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. [4]
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This article is not wrong but it is incomplete. It has failed to engage with proven ecological problems associated specifically with continued burning of fossil fuels: greenhouse gas accumulation and air pollution. Burning fossil fuels is not innocently beneficial so costs and benefits have to be considered. There is no way the future is bright for Earth civilization without restructured fossil fuel use. That's just obvious. It seems insurmountable. It seems impossible. But I am betting my career that we will find better ways. As good ancestors, we ought to create a better inheritance. The time of fossil fuels has passed.
The only way forward is a sustainability transformation. But this transformation is a surgery. There will be pain. There will be bleeding. There will be risk of infection. But there is healing value in cutting out a cancer if we proceed with minds wide open. We are responsible for this surgery. We can only go forward if we do the work to phase out dependency on fossil fuels because sustainability is worth it.