Part I: Income
For nearly all of human history, economy was really a product of ecology. Your economic reality was determined by your control of land and the natural 'services' of the land.
This relationship between economy and ecology existed mainly because ‘ecology’ is a result of living things making productive use of current solar income. The energy from the sun is ‘organized’, you could say, through photosynthesis, into the full variety of life forms. The sun is also the source of the energy that drives water, through evaporation and weather patterns, through the system. So ‘ecology’ has almost always been fundamental to making a living.
When you burn a piece of firewood, the heat you feel is really just sunlight backwards. The energy from the sun was stored in the wood, and the flame releases it back out. This same energy manifests in ‘crops’ of all kinds, and also in ‘game’, which concentrates and stores plant energy as meat.
This is basically why wars have almost always been fought over land. Physical control of land and water, and access to its productivity were essential, because income was determined by the amount of the sun’s energy that could be captured each year in the form of crops, game and wood.
The world economy grew as human ability to make use of current solar income improved. Innovations such as the water wheel and the sail boat harnessed the forces of water and weather and increased the amount of work a person could do in a day, as did early metallurgy powered by firewood. Early gross domestic product (GDP) can be seen as a direct measure of the relative ability of a group of people to innovate using current solar income.
Part II: The Savings Account… Coal, Natural Gas, and Oil
Things changed, though, when we figured out how to use fossil fuels. It slowly dawned on us that we didn’t have to rely on our annual income, because we had discovered the savings account.
Fossil fuels, specifically coal, natural gas and oil, are stored solar income. Just like the firewood contains the energy of the sun radiating onto the tree over its lifetime, these underground deposits contain the energy from the sun shining on plants… but over a period of millions of years.
Life is made of carbon, and the carbon stores the energy from the sun. In fact, we call the period of time from about 354 to 290 million years ago the Carboniferous Period because that’s when the plants that are now coal lived.
The quick explanation is that trees are made of cellulose – the fiber we make paper from – and lignin – the yellow gooey stuff that makes newspaper turn yellow. It was at the start of the Carboniferous period trees that began to produce lignin, and bacteria had not yet evolved a way to digest this new material. As a result, woody material that ended up in the lowland swamps never decomposed… and instead slowly compressed and hardened into what we now know as coal.
Because this process occurred over such a long time period, there is an enormous amount of coal in the earth. We know where there’s approximately 910 billion tons of coal and altogether people are burning about 6 billion tons each year now. About 75% of all coal mined is used for electricity production, and it’s the fastest growing energy source in the world.
Oil and natural gas were created a little differently than coal was, but the basic idea is the same. Organic material, in this case, plants and animals that lived in the water and were eventually buried, got compressed and essentially ‘cooked’ by heat, pressure and bacteria under layers of silt. Oil formed first, but as the cooking process continued, natural gas was formed, and this material has been held under rock formations at various depths beneath the earth’s crust since then.
Like coal, oil and natural gas were formed over a long time: during both the Jurassic (180 million to 140 million years ago) and the Cretaceous (140 million to 65 million years ago) periods, or a total era of 115 million years. The world’s first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, and we’ve burned about 1 trillion barrels since then… about half of the total inheritance of 115 million years.
While natural gas has been used since antiquity (like oil) when it naturally seeped out of the ground, the first use of the stuff in lighting was in Fredonia, New York, in 1821. We’ve got about 6.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas left on the planet (estimates vary from 6.1 to 7.0).
Keeping track of the exact accounting can drive you a little crazy, with all of the competing statistics and political objectives behind them. If the measures used to describe energy supplies and energy use were intended to be incomprehensible, they couldn’t have done a much better job… but it’s possible to simplify some of the terms used in order to get a better general understanding of what’s going on.
First of all, the standard measure, which is a ‘barrel’ of oil. Back when oil was first drilled in earnest, in the Pennsylvania fields, it was held in old whiskey barrels, and these came in both 40 and 42 gallon sizes. It was the Standard Oil Company (no surprise) that standardized the measure, and began shipping supplies in barrels that always contained exactly 42 gallons. These Standard Oil barrels were painted blue, which accounts for the abbreviation “bbl” which you see used to this day, and which means, absurdly, “blue barrels”. Because you’ve probably never seen a barrel of oil, but you’re probably pretty familiar with gasoline and what it can do, each 42 gallon barrel makes 19.5 gallons of gas.
The amount of energy in both natural gas and coal can be measured in their ‘equivalent’ barrels of oil… one barrel being approximately equal to 6,000 cubic feet of natural gas, and 410 pounds of coal.
So: here’s a description of our inheritance , measured in a unit you can actually imagine, which is gallons of gasoline.
The Reserve:
Coal 86.5 Trillion
Natural Gas 19.8 Trillion
Oil 19.5 Trillion
Total 125.9 Trillion
Current Use:
Coal 570 Billion/year
Natural Gas 325 Billion/year
Oil 604 Billion/year
Total 1,500 Billion/year
Years left
Coal 151.67
Natural Gas 61.12
Oil 32.26
If you investigate these figures, you'll find that there is tremendous, and very heated, controversy over pretty much all of them.
But the reason we all care so much about this stuff is that when we discovered the savings account, we didn’t have to rely so much on current income.
Part III: How Energy Disconnected the Economy from Ecology
The book you’re reading, and your desk and the lights that illuminate your room, your computer, your carpet, your furniture, your books, your clothing, your lunch, the car or bike you used to get here --- pretty much everything you need in the course of the day---comes from one of four primary industries. Mining, timber and agriculture, along with oil itself, are the starting point for all these things and it’s our energy inheritance that allowed us to go and get the millions of tons of them we use.
This tremendous inheritance has created wealth and abundance for billions of us, but at the same time it’s the primary reason that nature has become ‘invisible’ to the economy. To the extent it is ‘seen’ at all, nature is a place to go get the stuff we need to make into products. The terms we use are ‘raw materials’, ‘natural resources’, or ‘commodities’, and we use oil and gas and coal to power their mining and drilling and transport.
While energy hid the basic fact of our dependence on healthy planetary life support systems like water cycles, pollination and soil, resilient plant and animal populations and weather, it didn’t change it. Both the price of fossil fuels and the impact of climate change are connecting us back to ecology.
The price of fossil fuels is affecting our ability to drive around in cars, protected from the rain, the heat and the cold. It’s affecting the price of our food, as the price of fertilizer made from natural gas goes up and the cost of moving food to our grocery stores goes up. It’s making us more aware of what life would be like if we didn’t have the power of fossil fuels to buffer us from the challenges and uncertainties of planetary life.
Climate change is making us more aware of how dependent we are on being able to predict the weather. Since date, the Farmer’s Almanac has had good advice on what day to plant what crop in what part of the country. If you’re a gardener, you probably know about the planting zones published by Sunset Magazine that tell you what kinds of plants grow in what locations. Both of these sources are already changing the lines on their maps, because the weather itself is changing.
I wrote the outline for this book on June 12, 2008. At the back of the book is a simple list of weather records that were broken between that date and insert date here when I finished working on it. I’m sure this isn’t a complete list; it’s just the records that I came across when I read the NY Times in the morning or caught site of as I was web-surfing for one reason or another.
The fact that there are xx records in this list in just yy months is amazing, and this trend is increasing now. Just start checking it out for yourself. Look for the word ‘record’ in front of the words ‘rainfall’, ‘flood’, ‘drought’, ‘wind’, ‘temperature’, ‘snow’, ‘hail’ and so on when you read the paper or watch the news.
Because the records are falling all over the place, our basic ability to predict what the weather will do in a year or five years is crumbling. This affects investment, of course, in things like corn futures or home heating oil futures. It also affects how we design just about everything; roads, for example, are all sloped slightly to the side so that rain can run off quickly enough. The slope is determined by ‘100 year flood events’, which are simply the biggest rainfall to happen in a 24 hour period in the last 100 years. But if the last 100 years is no longer a good guide to the next 100 years, or even the next 5 or 10 years, it’s really hard to know how to design the road.
I can’t emphasize enough that this isn’t just some problem for the generations of the future. The US Department of Agriculture, for example, just released a major study entitled, “The effects of climate change on agriculture, land resources, water resources, and biodiversity,” and a major conclusion is that forest fires, insect outbreaks, precipitation, stream flows, stream temperatures, snowpack, peak runoff from snowmelt, plant growth, and migration of plant and animal species are all being affected now.
In 2008 the people of the earth are going to burn six billion tons of coal, xx tons of oil and yy tons of natural gas. Our share in the U.S. is 1.2 billion tons of coal, aa tons of oil and bb tons of natural gas. In the U.S., we’re burning the stuff more cleanly than ever, because the Clean Air Act has required everything from scrubbers to catalytic converters. This has cost some money (find out how much), but in comparison with the zz trillion dollar U.S. economy, this has been relatively affordable.
Because it was affordable, we were able to simply impose the cost through regulation.
The basic problem today is that we need to fix something that is really going to be hard to afford. This is the CO2 emitted from every ton of coal,CO2 emitted from every barrel of oil, and the CO2 emitted from every cubic foot of natural gas we burn to keep our economy going.
Part IV: How Economy and Ecology are Reconnecting
In the U.S. today, we emit about 20 tons of CO2 per person each year now. In China, the figure is about 5 tons of CO2 per person each year. Yet China already emits 17% more CO2 than the U.S.
We’ve been saying that we’re not going to reduce our CO2 emissions unless they do too, because it will hurt our economy if we absorb the cost of investing in reductions and they don’t. They’ve been saying there’s no way they can invest in reductions when they only create ¼ of the emissions per person that we do. The only way we’re going to get out of this mess is if the U.S. proves that investment in CO2 reductions, through creation of leading renewable energy and CO2 capture industries, creates jobs, growth, profits and improves the competitive position of the U.S.
What Americans need to realize is that there are already billions of dollars being invested in renewables and billions more being invested in CO2 capture through markets that reward every single ton of reductions.
Fortunately, we do know what to do.
We need to unleash the power of the $83 trillion dollar pool of investment capital now available by throwing the bone in the right direction. We need to create structures that allow competitive return on investment from two things. One is the creation of energy from renewable sources that don’t use fossil fuels so that we can create wealth and abundance with less CO2 emissions. The other is the creation of a new industry here in the U.S. that captures CO2 from the air with technical solutions and land management.
