The class I am taking on Energy and Sustainability has given me occasion to rethink the cost upon our living planet in man’s pursuit of energy, and profit. With consciousness being the partial product of advertising, it is been difficult to imagine a world not run by the fossil fuel industry. What would our planet be like with out burning oil fields, exploding rail cars, vast open pit mines, drilling operations, and the infrastructure required to excavate, mine, transport, refine, distribute, meter, burn, carbon-based fuel let alone maintaining such a complex infrastructure?
Petroleum as a source of energy is a relatively recent arrival in the history of civilization. This doesn’t mean that it is here forever; that man and carbon fuels will be joined at the hip until the end of humanity; unless of course fossil fuel consumption ushers in that end.
From the early 1600’s, until shortly after the invention of kerosene, whale oil lit the lamps of America and Western Europe. Consumers also used the bone, fat, and meat, of whales to make soap, perfumes, hoops for dresses, shirt stays, and candles.
1846 was the peak the whaling industry was the fifth largest income producing industry in the United States economy. Coincidentally, it was also the year in which kerosene was discovered and the petroleum industry began.
In 1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was published, six years past the whaling industry’s peak. By that time, kerosene had started to make inroads into the marketplace. The advent of less-expensive, more reliable petroleum technology eroded the need for rendered fat from whales to burn for light.
By 1861 America’s once valuable fleet of 640 whaling vessels were nearly worthless. Whaling ships were purchased by the Union Army, filled with granite, and strategically sunk in a failed attempt to blockade rivers during the American Civil war.
Before the end of the century, the whaling industry had declined by ninety percent, thanks to a still burgeoning petroleum technology and the discovery of plastics.
It may be difficult to imagine, but as the reigning technology of the day, no one thought whaling would lose its position in the marketplace:
“Great noise is made by many of the newspapers and thousands of the traders in the country about Lard oil, Chemical Oil, Camphene Oil, and a half dozen other luminous humbugs; and it has been confidently predicted by more than one astute prophet that the Sperm Oil trade would soon come to an end, and the whales be left in undisturbed possession of their abode . . . But let not our envious… hog-gish opponents, indulge themselves in any such dreams.” — From whale oil and beyond By Eric Jay Dolin That text sounds a lot like the gospel spouted by petroleum bloggers and pundits of today.
Today we have other sources of energy, fashion accessories, food, and and more, but the slaughter of whales continues.
The barbaric whaling video isn’t as much of a non sequitur as you might first think.
The deal is that the technology of petroleum will inevitably face the same fate as Ahab. The problem is that the new technologies for extracting petroleum products from the earth are equally murderous, barbaric and short-sighted.
Instead of poking harpoons into living breathing animals, we’re now doing the same to sections of the living earth which sustain us all. 97% of the water on our earth is undrinkable. After big capital has poisoned the aquifers, and solar or another technology has consumed the oil industry, Mobil, Shell, Exxon, and others will be selling you clean water to drink. If this sounds far-fetched, or paranoid, they are already in these industries.
Given what we know of whale oil, investing in fossil fuels today is analogous to investing in a dominant industry experiencing foundational cracks from the entry of new technology. What is worse is that fossil fuel companies are overvalued as they rely on “stranded assets;” carbon which will become unburnable for any of a number of reasons. This is going to result in a major loss of investment value for traditional producers.
Peter Terezakis
Tisch School of the Arts
http://www.terezakis.com
“The New Oil” • “The privatization of water““Water is too cheap.” • “Oil companies buy water rights”
THE SKY IS PINK by Josh Fox and the GASLAND Team from JFOX on Vimeo.
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