Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, 2021a

8 Fossil Fuels 125
8.4.3 On Balance?
Deciding whether fossil fuels have had a net-positive or net-negative
influence on humanity may not be answerable (Table 8.4 provides a
summary of the previous two subsections). How many lives has it
saved through better technology <strong>and</strong> health care? How many lives has
it destroyed through conflict, pollution, <strong>and</strong> transportation accidents?
How many lives has it created, through vast increases in agricultural
productivity—as well as via better medical care? How many species has
it destroyed, by promoting habitat loss both directly via extraction <strong>and</strong>
indirectly as a catalyst to population growth via increased agricultural
productivity? Sometimes it is even hard to decide which category to put
these impacts into. For instance, in the fullness of time, will we see all
the lives created on the back of fossil fuels as a good thing? If the result
is overshoot, collapse, <strong>and</strong> the unprecedented suffering of billions of
people, then perhaps not. It’s a mess.
In essence, humanity is running this global-scale unauthorized experiment
on the planet without a plan. Nothing like this has ever happened,
so we don’t know how it will turn out. We have plenty of evidence that
past civilizations overextend <strong>and</strong> collapsed [43], but we can’t identify
a fitting analog to successful navigation of the fossil fuel phenomenon.
Meanwhile, plenty of signs justify grave concern.
Table 8.4: Pros <strong>and</strong> cons of fossil fuels.
Pro
energy dense
safe
inexpensive
long storage
agriculture
technology
Con
climate change
overpopulation
agent of war
environ. damage
overdependency
so yesterday
[43]: Diamond (2005), Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed
8.5 The Future of Fossil Fuels
8.5.1 Scenarios
Figure 8.1 provocatively asserts that fossil fuel use must fall back to
essentially zero in a relatively short time (within a century or two). This
fact alone does not define our future on the spectrum of dismal to glorious,
but it is one we need to consider carefully given the fundamentally
important role fossil fuels have played in getting us to where we are
today. The return to zero fossil fuels could take a variety of forms:
1. We discover a new form of cheap energy not yet known or appreciated
that is a game changer, quickly ab<strong>and</strong>oning the fossil fuels
still left in the ground.
2. Known renewable energy sources (solar, wind) are developed to
the point of being effectively superior to fossil fuels so that market
forces naturally move us away from fossil fuels before actually
running out.
3. Climate change concerns result in politically enforced financial
dis-incentives to using fossil fuels, so that we migrate away—albeit
likely at higher cost, politically controversial, <strong>and</strong> not globally
adopted.
These are not strictly exclusive of each other,
so some combinations are also possible.
© 2021 T. W. Murphy, Jr.; Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Lic.;
Freely available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions.