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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.
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Polling shows anti-clean-energy BS is working
Sobering opinion numbers from the Pew Research Center on “Americans’ Shifting Views on Energy Issues”:
The share of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who say the country should prioritize oil, coal and natural gas over wind and solar power has doubled to 71% over the last six years.
I won’t quote extensively; the gist is that respondents generally have shifted away from preferring clean & renewable energy, and toward fossil fuels. This is especially pronounced among Republicans. You can click through if you want to see the rather depressing numbers and charts.
They word all of this very passively, which may be the impartial style that suits an opinion research organization. But presuming that’s the case, they shouldn’t title a section of this article, “Why are views changing on wind and solar energy?”, because they do not even try to answer that question. The answer is very simple: the billionaire class generally, including companies as well as individuals, and the Republican party specifically, have long waged a very concentrated and very well-funded campaign of lies to achieve these very results.
Because – pardon my language – how the fuck could any sensible person, let alone 20% of “Republican/Lean Republican” people, think that solar is “worse” for the environment?! (The 4% of “Dem/Lean Dem” in the same category are equally mystifying, but that number is almost low enough to just chalk up to the uninformed and the fools.) I mean, really. Worse! How??
It’s so tragically comical that I won’t even interrogate it on the merits. There are no merits! This is like a doctor telling an unhealthy, pre-diabetic person with obesity that they should switch from drinking a gallon of soda a day to drinking a gallon of water, and then their crazy (red-pilled, Fox-news-addled, MAGA) buddy convincing them that that would be worse for them. It’s just pure nonsense.
When getting into specific projects, there can be issues to figure out. Land-use by large solar and wind farms, who pays for what and who benefits (i.e., keeping for-profit utilities from ripping off consumers), and so on. But in the big picture, as portrayed by this survey and the people being asked broad questions like “Is solar good or bad?” and “Is coal good or bad?”, anti-clean-energy propaganda is just that. It’s craven, self-serving, for-profit bullshit.
This is the fight: to educate those who need it, and to un-misinform those who have been fed these lies.
Here’s your cheat-sheet if you ever get included in a survey like this:
- Production of wind and solar power: encourage 👍
- Use of electric vehicles: encourage 👍
- Production of nuclear power: discourage 👎
- Oil and gas drilling: discourage 👎
- Coal mining: discourage 👎
It's high time to go solar