There is No Turning Back
Among the negative reactions I’ve seen to our work on the TEDxOilSpill Expedition, and our work to bring awareness of how big this disaster is, many can be summed up as: “Well, if you don’t like it, stop using your car! Don’t drive to the grocery store. Stop enjoying all the benefits of modern life!” It’s an easy point to make. After all, we had to consume jet fuel to get to Louisiana. We bought several tanks of gas in our travels. Even our overflight of the source consumed petroleum fuel.
The irony of it isn’t lost of me. Not at all.
It’s a tangled thought that I’ve been fighting a long time. And there are lots of ways it manifests itself. I fly all over the United States and the world to make my images. Should I stop? What is the cost/benefit analysis of making the images I make? For conferences like TED, where my images do get used to help ideas worth spreading, I think the equation is acceptable. Some of those people might be able to make the connections they need to crack a nut that opens up the future to us. But, I do think about the consumption of oil it takes to do that.
Taken too far, however, this kind of thinking can lead you into a very dark place. After all, the best way not to have a carbon load is not to exist. But that’s not a viable strategy. Personal suicide isn’t an answer. Besides, we’d have to kill off a lot of people to really make an impact anyway. That’s not a solution any of us can live with, I suspect.
The bulk of my direct petroleum consumption is travel by jet plane. In every other aspect of my life, I have reduced my consumption massively. Especially when I’m home in Portland. I drive my car far less in a year than the average American. I do, in fact, walk to the grocery store. I also walk to go out to eat and drink at night. That’s because I purposely chose the neighborhood I live in to support a lifestyle that didn’t require a car. In fact, my car quite often doesn’t get used for weeks on end. It’s one of the few places you can live this way in the United States.
Because I live in Portland, I don’t need to run my air conditioning system non-stop for six months like you do in Texas or Florida. Because I live in a home with one exterior wall, my heating costs in the winter are very low. I buy wind power from my local utility. These are all choices I made deliberately. All these choices help.
But I’m still painfully aware that everything I eat consumes oil in some way or another. So does my clothing. Even the water I drink. I could try to cut out my oil consumption as much as possible and yet my life as it today could not exist without consuming a massive amount of oil. The very laptop I’m writing this on was made in China and shipped via freighter plane, for chrissake. Consuming less helps, but it only goes so far.
To be fair, one shouldn’t look at our petroleum consumption in entirely negative light. The biggest reason humanity has gotten as far as it has in the last hundred years—years that have seen unprecedented progress, gains in knowledge, science, health, and agriculture—is because we have tapped into millions of years of energy storage from the sun in the form of petroleum hydrocarbons. It’s a bounty that has reshaped our world in a blink of an eye. Even if we’d known better at the time, I doubt we’d have chosen any other path.
We wouldn’t be here without oil. Yet we can’t live with it going forward. That’s the fundamental riddle of our time. Many of the major issues we face—climate change, international security, environmental pollution—all have their roots in energy, where we get it, and how we use it. Energy is right at the crux of it all.
Becoming a luddite and withdrawing from the modern world—as tempting as it may sound—is not the answer. You can do it on a personal level, but unless you really get out there and plant your own food and make your own clothing, you’re still consuming oil. If you can get to that point, great. More power to you. But good luck getting everyone else on board with that. Does anybody even know if you can support 6 billion people on this planet by trying to live life like we did in 1700? I suspect not. We erased forests across Europe and North America with that lifestyle with far fewer people.
Besides, knowledge once found tends not to be forgotten. Even if you could knock us back a few hundred years to take the pressure off, now that we know what we can do with petroleum, you can bet we’d be using it again in no time flat. It might give ourselves a reprieve, but it’s not a solution. You’d have to annihilate us off the planet to wipe that knowledge out. Of course, nature might do that for us, but let’s not let that happen.
I believe there’s no turning back. We are where we are. We can only go forward. And we have to go forward fast. Very fast. The next ten years may be the most important ten years in human history. We have to fundamentally change where we get energy from. Individual reduction in consumption helps, but it does so mostly in extending the runway we have in order to completely shift onto something else. Or a basket of something elses. Because if we don’t shift, it’s eventually game over no matter how much any particular individual scales back.
Wind and solar are part of the equation. But we need more than that. Should we look at nuclear again? Possibly. I can’t imagine that burning coal in a million plants is somehow more safe in the aggregate than using nuclear power. I’m unhappy that research into thorium cycle reactors stopped a long time ago because they weren’t very useful in building bombs, and I’m happy that interest in them is sparking up again. On the fusion side of the equation, I hope that the tests at the National Ignition Facility this summer do indeed result in net energy output. Damn. Wouldn’t that be cool? Even so, electricity isn’t ideal for all applications. Fuel is energy dense and hard to replace in some applications, such as aircraft. I hope to fly on a jet fueled by Sapphire Energy’s algea-derived jet fuel soon. Maybe other solutions not yet imagined will emerge.
How is that going to happen? Innovation. Good old fashioned technological progress. It’s what we do. It’s what we’re good at when we can figure out how to apply ourselves. We just have to make sure that ideas keep spreading and that progress gets made.
