Fossil Fuels and Our Civilization

I don't want to be tarred and feathered but we have to state some truths out in the open...

Our current civilization was build on top of fossil fuels. Without them we would probably now be living very similar lives to the ones in which our ancestors struggled to survive in 1850.

Almost certainly, today we wouldn't have massive access to cars and air travel (if at all). The world wouldn't be nearly as globalized and thus things would be much more expensive and the choices likewise limited.

Electricity would almost certainly still be a lab curiosity, and thus we wouldn't enjoy air conditioning, elevators, powerful illumination, etc. 

The rest of the technological advances would probably had been delayed for centuries and thus today we would not have computers, the Internet, cell phones, TV, radio, Twitter, you name it.

Below, we can see the global energy use since 1850.

Without fossil fuels we would almost certainly had destroyed our forests just to use their wood as fuel and whales would have been eradicated from the planet. Food production (without mechanization, some fertilizers, etc.) would also be much lower. 

So the way to go back to a world with as low emissions as we had in 1850 is to essentially renounce to all the convienences of our modern civilization and starve six billion persons.

This won't happen. Period. Consequently, our fossil fuel use in the next few decades will, far from decreasing, increase at a consistent pace. In the short / medium term, no disruption of the climate could be worse for humanity than returning to an energy poor society.

Sure, the day of reckoning will come but when people are given the choice between killing their children (through energy scarcity) or killing their eventual great-grandchildren (through an overheated planet) most will certainly select the latter. 

Can we replace fossil fuels with low carbon energies? In the short term the answer is no and this is due to the MAGNITUDE of the energy we have to replace. Even with aggressive growth, the EIA estimates that solar PV will be less than 1% of our global total primary energy supply by 2040; wind could be close to 3%. However, the absolute growth in fossil fuels use during this same period would completely overshadow the increases in low carbon energy.

In the long term (50 to 100 years) we could replace fossil fuels with a bit of hydro, a little sun & wind and lots of nuclear (either fission alone or combined with fusion).

So bar a very disruptive black swan, the RESPONSIBLE thing to do is to plan for a "business as usual" consumption of fossil fuels for the next few decades. 

Bringing our atmosphere back to 350 ppm of CO2 this century is completely unrealistic. Our plans should probably consider concentrations of 600 ppm by the year 2100. 

Now, after planning for the worst it doesn't mean we should sit down with our arms crossed, no. We should act, and our top three priorities should probably be:

1. Reduce our per capita energy consumption.

2. Stop population growth.

3. Start moving as fast as feasible to lower carbon sources.

Jack Welch said that effective management consists of looking reality in the eye and acting accordingly.

Humanity cannot afford more wishful thinking, we should follow Jack's advice.

International Energy Outlook 2013

At the bottom of this page is a link to the full International Energy Outlook 2013 report (300+ pages) from the EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration).




All highlights below from this report refer to the period from 2010 to 2040 for the world.

• Energy use will increase 56%.
• It will grow from 524 to 820 quadrillion BTUs.
• The OECD countries will increase their consumption by only 17%.
• The non-OECD countries will increase it by 90%.
• Fossil Fuels will continue to comprise close to 80% of our total consumption.
• These are the projected growths for each fuel type:
• Natural gas: 63.8%
• Coal: 48.9%
• Liquids: 32.1%
• In absolute terms, fossil fuel use will grow faster than all other energies combined. 
• Carbon dioxide emissions, thus will also continue to increase from 31 to 45 billion metric tons. An increase of 45%.
• By 2040 these will be the market shares of the following low carbon energy sources in the production of electricity:
• Hydro: 16.0%
• Nuclear: 14.1%
• Wind: 4.7%
• Solar: 1.2%
• Overall, electricity generation increases by 93%.

In graph form, this is how the most important indicators look:

Conclusion: the struggle against climatic change is much more difficult than most people realize. Far from advancing, we are really losing ground. More efforts at every level would be required to change the above projections into something less dangerous for humanity.

Link to the full EIA Report:
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/?src=home-b2