Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
economy. While elements of the Scientific Revolution were in place a couple of centuries prior to
our adoption of fossil fuels, cheap fossil energy supplied a means of vastly expanding scientific
research and applying it to the development of a broad range of technologies that are themselves
directly or indirectly fossil-fueled. With heightened mobility, immigration increased greatly, and the
democratic multiethnic nation state became the era's emblematic political institution. As economies
expanded almost continually due to the abundant availability of high-quality energy, neoliberal eco-
nomic theory emerged as the world's primary ideology of societal management. It soon evolved to
incorporate several unchallenged though logically unsupportable notions, including the belief that
economies can grow forever and the assumption that the entire natural world is merely a subset of
the human economy.
Now, however, our still-new infrastructural regime based on fossil fuels is already showing
signs of winding down. There are two main reasons. One is climate change: carbon dioxide, pro-
duced in the burning of fossil fuels, is creating a greenhouse effect that is warming the planet. The
consequences will be somewhere between severe and cataclysmic. If we continue burning fossil
fuels, we're more likely to see a cataclysmic result, which could make continuation of industrial ag-
riculture, and perhaps civilization itself, problematic. We do have the option to dramatically curtail
fossil fuel consumption to avert catastrophic climate change. Either way, our current infrastructure
will be a casualty.
The second big reason our fossil fuel-based infrastructure is endangered has to do with deple-
tion. We're not running out of coal, oil, or natural gas in the absolute sense, but we have extracted
these nonrenewable resources using the best-first, or low-hanging fruit, principle. With oil, the most
strategically important of the fossil fuels (because of its centrality to transportation systems), we
have already reached the point of diminishing returns. Compared to a decade ago, the global pet-
roleum industry has more than doubled its rate of investment in exploration and production, while
actual rates of global crude oil production have flatlined. Costs of production are rising, and drillers
are targeting geological formations that were formerly considered too problematic to bother with.
With oil, the fate of the world's economy appears to hang on the outcome of a race between tech-
nology and depletion: while industry spokespeople and media pundits tend to cheer new techno-
logy such as hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), persistently high oil prices and soaring production
costs suggest that depletion is in fact pulling ahead.
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Coal and natural gas production will likely
encounter similar diminishing-return limits within the next decade, both in the United States and
worldwide.
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At a bare minimum, climate change and fossil fuel depletion will force society to change to
different energy sources, giving up reliance on energy-dense and controllable coal, oil, and gas in
favor of more diffuse and intermittent renewable sources like wind and solar. This in itself is likely
to have enormous societal implications. While electric passenger cars running on power supplied
by wind turbines and solar panels are feasible, electric airliners, container ships, and eighteen-wheel
trucks are not. Distributed electricity generation from renewables, together with a decline in global
shipping and air transport, may favor less globalized and more localized patterns of economic and
political organization.
However, we must also consider the strong likelihood that our looming, inevitable shift away
from fossil fuels will entail a substantial reduction in the amount of useful energy available to soci-
ety. Wind and sunlight are abundant and free, but the technology used to capture energy from these
ambient sources is made from nonrenewable minerals and metals. The mining, manufacturing, and
