On the Rube Goldberg machine of fossil fuel production

This newsletter from Bill McKibben, from a few months ago (shortly after the US began its illegal war on Iran) makes such a good point. Rube Goldberg’s machines were comically silly, but the tremendous complexity, expense, and risks of the real-world fossil fuel extraction, delivery, and usage systems are deadly serious.

I’ll quote a chunk of it here, but the full details are well worth a few minutes of your time.

If you want a gallon of gas for your car, someone first needs to have drilled for oil—in a few places (Saudi Arabia) this is still relatively easy, but increasingly it means figuring out how to go a mile beneath the surface of the sea, or frack the subsurface geology, which is to say blow it apart. Once you’ve collected your crude, you need to carry it to a port, often through a pipeline that must cross mountain and desert, and there load it on to a giant ship, which must sail the seas. Upon arrival somewhere, it needs to be piped to a refinery, which is among the most complicated pieces of machinery known to man. There it must be separated by heating in a distillation column, so that the light products—gasoline—rise to the top, and heavy products—say, asphalt—sink to the bottom. You use heat and pressure and chemical catalysts to “crack” some of the heavier molecules into lighter, more valuable products, and then you treat what you’ve got to remove impurities like sulfur. You pipe it part of the way to its final destination, and load it into trucks for delivery to gas stations, where it is stored in underground tanks, until someone appears with a credit card to pump it into his vehicle. In the engine of the car it is mixed with air inside a cylinder and compressed; a spark plug fires, forcing a piston to move; this linear motion is converted by a crankshaft into rotational energy to move the car; meanwhile the piston pushes out the burned gases.

The point is that continuing to depend on that dirty, dangerous way of powering our lives, when we can literally get energy freely, cleanly, and quickly from sunlight (and wind) just about anywhere on the planet, is crazy.