The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [74]
We Live Like Gods
In order to understand why oil, in particular, is so important to our economy and our daily lives, we have to understand something about what it does for us. We value any source of energy because we can harness it to do work for us. For example, every time you turn on a 100-watt light bulb, it’s the same as if you had a fit human being in the basement pedaling as hard as they can to keep that bulb lit. That’s how much energy a single light bulb uses. While you run water, take hot showers, and vacuum the floor, it’s as if your house is employing the services of 50 such extremely fit bike-riding slaves in the basement, ready to pedal their fastest, 24 hours a day, at the flick of a switch. When you jump in a car, depending on your engine, it’s the same as a king harnessing up a carriage to 300 horses. This “slave count,” if you will, exceeds that of kings in times past. Given the fact that even kings of times past could not whip out a credit card on a whim and find themselves halfway around the world in less than a day, it should be said that we enjoy the power of gods.
And how much “work” is embodied in a gallon of gasoline, our favorite substance of them all? Well, if you put a single gallon in a car, drove it away from your home until the gas ran out, and then got out and pushed the car home, you’d find out exactly how much work a gallon of gasoline can do. It turns out that a gallon of gas has the equivalent energy of somewhere between 350 and 500 hours of human labor.17 Given that a gallon of gas can perform that much human work, how much value would you assign it? How much would 350 to 500 hours of your hard physical labor be worth to you? $4? $10? Assuming you decided not to push your car home and paid someone $15 an hour to do this for you, you’d find that a gallon of gasoline is “worth” $5,250 to $7,500 in human labor.
Here’s another example: It has been calculated that the amount of food that an average North American citizen consumes in a year requires the equivalent of 400 gallons of petroleum to produce and ship.18 At $3/gallon, that works out to $1200 of your yearly food bill spent on fuel, which doesn’t sound too extreme. However, when we consider that those 400 gallons represent the energy equivalent of close to 100 humans working year-round at 40 hours a week, then it takes on an entirely different meaning. This puts your diet well out of the reach of most kings of times past. Just to put this in context, as it’s currently configured, food production and distribution uses fully two-thirds of the U.S. domestic oil production. This is one reason why a cessation of oil exports to the United States would be highly disruptive; most of our domestic production would have to go toward feeding ourselves.
Aside from the way that oil works tirelessly in the background to make our lives easy beyond historical measure, oil is a miracle in other ways. In the industrial processes, oil is the primary input feedstock to innumerable necessities of life, such as fertilizer, plastics, paint, synthetic fibers, countless chemical processes, and airplane rides. When we consider other potential fuel sources, we find that they are mostly incapable of fulfilling these needs.
It could be said that we all live like kings, but truthfully, even the wealthiest king of times past couldn’t click on a link, order an item made halfway around the world, and have it in his hands the next day. That ability is something the ancient Greeks would have recognized as the power of a god, and so it is.
1 While there are a number of potentially exciting new technologies and energy sources in the labs and even in pilot demonstrations—including cellulosic ethanol, methanol, and algal biofuels—I set a high bar; in order to be included in this book, they actually had to be in commercial production at a level that cracked the 1 percent-of-total-fuel