Me, the Fossil Fuel Shill

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Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

I often get comments at the end of my articles that I’m a shill for fossil fuels. I guess this is because I frequently ‘denigrate’ wind and solar, which then automatically qualifies me as a ‘climate change denier’ as well. I also point out time after time how fossil fuels are essential to everything this civilization does, only to get comments in response that my points are ‘unsubstantiated’. My worst sin, and the ultimate proof that I’m indeed a shill for the oil industry, however, remains the fact that I choose to be anonymous. 

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These remarks, of course, are nothing but weak attempts made at coping with the fundamental predicament this modern tech based society is facing. Before we get to that though, let me share a tad bit more about my background. As most of you know, or already guessed, I’m a mechanical engineer by profession, living in a small Central European country. After I finished my studies I started to work for a large (very large) American multinational company as a maintenance engineer. I was responsible for machines working with very high heat (2000 °C), with cooling provided by liquid nitrogen, immense pressures, exotic gases (Argon, Xenon), rare metals (Tungsten, Molybdenum), welding, vacuum furnaces and so on. What did those machines make? — one might be tempted to ask. Parts for space rockets? — No, my dear friends. Light bulbs.

Yes, freaking halogen headlights for your cars. The manufacturing of this old school part you used to buy for cents involved so many exotic materials and technologies that it would bewilder even the most enthusiastic tech fan. Since we were working with rare materials, a shortage on the other side of the planet had an immediate effect on our production costs. 

Through this experience I was quickly made aware how interdependent the world economy is, and how its stability hinges upon uninterrupted supply chains, abundant raw material flows, and most importantly: cheap energy.

It also made me appreciate the different forms of energy, their usefulness in certain applications, but also their limitations. Like how electricity can be used to create stable heating conditions up to, but not beyond 800 °C, and thus how it’s utterly useless to melt glass, where you need temperatures in to stay above 1700 °C constantly (24/7!) in order to prevent glass from freezing into a virtually unmeltable slab at the bottom of your furnace.

There are of course many more forms of energy other than electricity, like natural gas, hydrogen (yes, some of the machines I used to work on used that as a fuel decades ago already!), diesel, jet fuel, coal etc. — all with their unique place in the manufacturing supply chain. All took their share according to their availability, scalability and cost.

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I worked for more than a decade at this company, gradually moving away from manufacturing into the supply chain and logistics area. I visited China and saw with my own eyes how they built up high tech factories ten times the size of ours in a matter of years. I also saw some brutal contrasts: how cheap companies utilized the the dirtiest of technologies, especially when it came to working with toxic metals built not only into light bulbs, but also finding their way into electric motors and generators, the so called ‘green technologies’. 

The lower I went on the food chain the more dirt, sweat and fumes I saw. Most of the rare earth metals, for example, are still to this day coming from mines in Congo or Inner Mongolia, where harmful substances are handled without protective equipment, radioactive tailing ponds are scattered around the landscape and the wind blows toxic dust into houses and onto crops people eat. Without this experience I would not be writing so brazenly about the sustainability of ‘renewables’. Sure, the ‘production’ of these metals could be made more people and environmentally friendly… But at what cost…? Would it raise the price of panels and turbines into a prohibitive range? Most probably, I guess.

There is no such thing as clean (and cheap) energy. The same goes to drilling for oil, the many spills, toxic tailing ponds (holding fracking fluid and all sorts of chemical pollutants), deforestation before mining oil sands and so on. We use technology to eat this planet alive and it really doesn’t matter in the end if we destroyed a living habitat to mine metals for ‘renewables’ or through burning fossil fuels. We just change the type of waste we leave behind.

Photo by Andreas Gücklhorn on Unsplash

After a decade, I switched companies (this time for a German brand), and got involved in developing “the future”: the self-driving car. As I was working on the test methodology and logistics of public road validation, I realized that this is not a technology which is about to change the world tomorrow (to say the least). So I switched jobs again, this time to the electric and hybrid car business to see how that sausage is made. Well, no big news here: the same old rare metals, intricate technologies, six continent supply chains, as well as high resource and energy use. Not a marketing managers dream to say the least… I guess you start to see now why I choose to remain anonymous. 

In fairness the company I work for does everything it can to avoid child labor and materials of questionable origin and works according to the highest environmental standards. It also aims at reducing the CO2 emissions released during the entire supply chain process — a noble goal of its own. This doesn’t change the fact, however, that electric cars without abundant (and cheap) raw materials — mostly metals — and a lot of cheap energy (not to mention an unseen expansion of the electric grid to support them) are nothing more than luxury items for the well to do. 

The same goes to ‘renewables’ made from tons of copper, silver, silicon, arsenic, gallium and so on. All these technologies are based on finite minerals, none of which is replenishing itself magically, nor can be recycled with a 100% efficiency. As I learned throughout my years spent in the industry, there will always be a part too tiny to bother with (like a light bulb), not to mention the gross human negligence in returning every single bit of consumer good from every single household in every single country on Earth into a recycling plant.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you pinned your hopes on a circular economy, it ain’t gonna happen.

Recycling operations themselves are focusing on the largest, most valuable parts and discard the rest as waste, alongside the toxic chemicals and acids used in the process, leaking toxins into the groundwater and creating problems for generations to come. Pollution doesn’t stop at the mine — it is omnipresent along the entire supply chain of metals essential for ‘green technologies’. This should be a major-major concern, but it rarely, if ever gets mentioned.

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Here comes climate change, and the environment in general into the picture. Based on the studies I read, global warming does look very much real to me. I fully appreciate how it is already affecting our lives, and how it will get worse (much worse) with time… Heck, this was the revelation that started me off on my journey towards better understanding our sustainability! However, based on what I learned about green technologies, I found it utterly illogical that by more mining, deforestation, using more groundwater, and most importantly by burning through finite resources we will ‘tackle’ climate change, let alone stopping the sixth mass extinction.

Deploying ‘renewables’ involve burning a lot of diesel in heavy machinery, ships and trains, and can currently cannot be done without fossil fuels. From the excavator shoveling the copper and other metals ores in the mine in Peru, to the dumper truck carrying the ore to the refinery, the vast cargo ships transporting the substance to China where it is made into clean metal slabs in a foundry, fossil fuels are everywhere. Then trucks carry the parts into an assembly plant, and from there to a container ship through which it gets to Europe. (The lorry which then picks them up at the port and carries them to the site (cleaned and prepared by heavy machinery) is also powered by diesel, so is the crane doing the heavy lifting.) Sorry to be so blunt with you: there is no such thing as an energy transition, only extension.

We’ve found ourselves in a hole, yet we keep insisting that digging deeper is the way out. 

It is absolutely no wonder then that there was not a single project in the past half a century aimed at proving that renewables can be made by renewable energy alone, all the way through the entire supply chain. As I explained above, every process step, be it mining or manufacturing has its optimal fuel type for very good reasons, and this won’t change just because some government want it so.

Does this mean, that we should keep burning fossil fuels like there was no climate to worry about? Hardly. With every ton of carbon-dioxide added to the atmosphere we would make our and our descendants life much harder in a much hotter world, beside risking setting off unstoppable feedback loops known as climate tipping points (like the arctic methane cycle). If we haven’t already.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

This is not to mention that all fossil fuels are finite resources, just like all other minerals. After burning through the cheapest and highest quality oil, coal and gas deposits we are now forced to milk the source rock (shale oil) and drill deeper and deeper under the sea. Getting fossil fuels has slowly become ever more energy intensive, demanding an ever larger portion of them being diverted back into production. While half a century ago most oil could be get by reinvesting a mere 1% of their energy into drilling, now this takes 15%, and by 2050 we will hit 50%. This is an unsustainable trajectory in an economy demanding ever greater amount of oil, not only to maintain its current output levels, but to — purportedly — replace its main source of energy.

At a certain point — and I firmly believe that we are right there — demand outstrips supply. Prices spike, then fall sharply as machines burning the fuel get mothballed and companies using them go bankrupt. Oil companies become reluctant to invest into new drilling, because they don’t see a return on rising costs (energy, equipment, other inputs), plus drilling new wells becomes riskier as fat, high yield ones dry up and only the low quality dregs remain. This lack of investment begets a new supply shortfall, followed by another price hike and another round of demand destruction. This is peak oil: not running out of oil all of a sudden, but slowly one step at a time, while leaving most of it under the ground.

I’m not calling for subsidizing fossil fuels in any way. It would solve neither depletion nor the rapidly increasing energy demand for drilling, only fuel inflation even further. What I’m trying to draw attention to is that fossil fuels in general and oil in special is still essential to everything we do. At the same time these are also very polluting forms of energy and directly cause climate change. ‘Renewables’ on the other hand are made by using these very fuels in every stage of their lifecycle, and are based on the same extractive mindset: using a one-time mineral inheritance in a polluting and unsustainable way.

I’m also drawing attention to the fact, that fossil fuels are finite substances. We will leave them behind, not because we no longer need them, but because they slowly become energetically unaffordable. It will take more and more energy to get them, together with the metal ores we all pin our renewable hopes on (for the same reason: depletion).

‘Renewables’ and electrification simply replace the consumption of one finite resource and its related pollution (fossil fuels and CO2) with another set of finite resources and their related pollution (metals and ecological destruction caused by mining, plus the CO2 released during the process). All the while these technologies are doing nothing to stop the sixth mass extinction and pollution crisis we are witnessing… The same goes for carbon sequestration, geoengineering, the hydrogen economy, nuclear, bio-fuels, fusion, mining in space, colonizing other planets and all the rest. None of these ‘solutions’ address excess consumption of the living world and turning her into lifeless junk, just prolong its shelf-life.

If you want to save the world, first do no harm.

This is the end of the modern high tech era as we know it, and there is nothing we can do to stop it… And its fine. Our biggest ‘problem’ at the moment is not climate change: it is the predicament of overshoot, the consumption of Nature together with its finite resources, and polluting beyond tolerance. Climate change is but a symptom of this much larger issue.

Photo by James Wheeler on Unsplash

If I’m a shill for anything, it is the preservation of Nature, even if it comes at the cost of powering down the economy and returning to a low-tech life powered by manual work. I’m fully aware that most of us (including my friends and loved ones) do not even realize that this is a necessity, and not a choice. Most of us live in a happy bubble thinking that material growth — or at least a steady state at this level — can go on forever. All based on finite minerals, on a finite planet. What could possibly go wrong…? 

We are at a turning point though, where global growth slowly becomes impossible and turns into a global economic contraction — primarily due to the increasing scarcity of energy and resources. This change is coming whether you like it or not, want it or not. It is not going to be dictated by governments, politicians or ideologues, but the very biophysical reality, all of our lives are rooted in. 

Until that sinks in, denial will prevail though. The deployment of ‘renewables’ — together with drilling for oil — will thus go on for as long as remaining cheap metal and fossil fuel deposits last. Then the idea of the ‘energy transition’ will slowly fade away, together with a stable electric grid and a steady supply of goods and services. Again, it doesn’t matter which technology you root for — be it nuclear, renewables, or oil — it all doesn’t matter. We will have to wave goodbye to all these technologies in order of material availability, whether we like them or not. Our future will increasingly become low-tech, local and based on more and more manual labor, as energy will be reserved for food production and war (what else?)

This is going to be a decades long process. Not a sudden apocalypse, but a long descent. Demographic trends (ageing), pollution (especially PFAS, causing infertility and cancer), together with climate change will take care of a steady population decline till we fall back well below the 1 billion mark by the end of this century. Lacking the energy to get them, much of our oil reserves will be left underground, together with most of our mineral deposits, for the same reason. Big cities will be abandoned, together with polluted areas and inundated seashores. Nature will start its long healing process on her own terms, taking countless millennia to complete. 

Meanwhile new civilizations, based on much lower material standards, will arise to start their own journey into the future. While all this might sound terrifying to some (hence the denial), this is perfectly normal. It has happened to many civilizations before. Ours is not going to be the first, and hopefully not the last, to go through its phase of decline. 

What matters, is how do we go through this bottleneck. Do we use technology to aid us in this transition? How shall we use up the last remaining resources? Will we be good to our fellow humans in need? Will we support warmongers wanting to start a war with every nation they have a problem with, or opt for peace and cooperation? Many tough questions to be answered, many decisions to be made. Think about that.

Until next time,

B