The scenario : Out of the ash of some global catastrophe , humanity go up to re - establish civilisation . The doubt : How far could such a society realistically rebuild without the aid of fossil fuel ?
University of Leicester’sLewis Dartnell , a UK Space Agency inquiry fellow working in exobiology and the search for microbial living on Mars , cogitates on this question ina must - read objet d’art over atAeon :
It ’s easy to underestimate our current dependence on fossil fuels . In daily aliveness , their most visible economic consumption is the gasolene or diesel pumped into the fomite that satiate our roads , and the coal and born gas which go off the power stations that wire our New lives . But we also rely on a range of different industrial materials , and in most cases , high temperatures are need to transmute the stuff we grind out of the ground or harvest home from the landscape into something useful . You ca n’t smell alloy , make glass , roast the ingredients of concrete , or synthesize artificial fertiliser without a lot of heat . It is fossil fuel – ember , gas pedal and crude oil – that provide most of this thermic vigor .
In fact , the problem is even worse than that . Many of the chemicals demand in bulk to guide the modern world , from pesticides to plastics , derive from the diverse organic compounds in crude oil . Given the dwindle down reserves of rough oil left in the world , it could be argued that the most uneconomical economic consumption for this special resource is to simply combust it . We should be cautiously carry on what ’s left for the vital repertoire of worthful constituent compounds it offers .
But my subject here is not what we should do now . Presumably everybody love that we must transition to a low - C economy one way or another . No , I want to suffice a question whose pastime is ( let ’s go for ) more theoretic . Is the emersion of a technologically advanced civilisation necessarily depending on on the easy availability of ancient energy ? Is it possible to build an industrialised civilization without fossil fuel ? And the answer to that dubiousness is : perhaps – but it would be super difficult . Let ’s see how .
This is an interesting exercise . interpret the rest period atAeon . See also – because it is plain unsufferable to talk about the post - Revelation and fogey fuels at the same metre without mentioning Mad Max – this clause aboutthe environmental impingement that Mad Max : Fury Road had in Namibia , when it filmed there in 2012 .
reach the author at[email protect ] .
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