Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Source: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook
This is counterintuitive; the more we use, the more we have.
How did this happen? Stay tuned.
Why did so many expect catastrophic depletion? Again, there was a failure to think big picture. Many
experts paid attention only to our consumption of oil and gas resources, but not our ability to create new
oil and gas resources.
It's true that once we burn a barrel of oil, it's gone. But it's also true that
human ingenuity
can dramatic-
ally increase the amount of coal, oil, or gas that is available. It turns out that there are many times more of
each in the ground than we have used in the entire history of civilization—it's just a matter of developing
the technology to extract them economically.
34
And in general, human beings are amazingly good at using
ingenuity to create wealth, which means to create resources. We take the materials around us and make
them more valuable; that's how we went from starving in a cave to producing a cornucopia of food that we
can enjoy in comfortable homes. The thought leaders did not sufficiently consider these virtues of human
beings.
What about the prediction that our environment would degrade as we used more fossil fuels and more
everything? Our escalating fossil fuel use was definitely supposed to be punished with a much, much dirti-
er environment.
What actually happened? We'll look at all major measures of environmental quality in chapter 8, but
for now let's look at clean air and clean water. Both have increased substantially.
Here are measurements from the EPA of six major air pollutants. As fossil fuel use goes up, they go
down.
