Image nuts swaying with plant life, oceans swaying with life, dinosaurs running across the Earth. Imagine that plants and animals die, and over the course of 300 million years, coal, oil and gas become complex series of processes underground. Fast forward to the present and now see the healing, earth-wrecking machine that extracts these dead plants and animals to power our economy.
How much longer can we stop this? Has starved enough plants and animals in the ancient past to maintain our current levels of fossil fuel use forever? What happens if we blow through all available fossil fuels this century, release a gag of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like the planet has never seen?
It would be somewhere between super bad and sublime screws if we did. De world has not exactly shown much appetite limiting the use of fossil fuels. That’s not what the world says will continue that path of course. But this is Freget Giz, and we’re here to ask the strange questions and get down to the nitty gritty. So we asked a number of experts in the fields of technology, physics, climate models and paleoclimates what would happen to the climate – and society – if we maintained our fossil fuel bender to the last drop.
Sarah Carmichael
Professor of Geochemistry, Appalachian State University and National Geographic Explorer
The first thing to consider are time scales. If we burned all fossil fuels, the amount of carbon dioxide would have been put into the atmosphere in such a short time, unlike anything that has happened in the history of the earth. Even the end-Permian extinction (where 96% of life is extinct) is not really analogous. The Late Permian was due to massive volcanism, and probably this process was the equivalent of burning many fossil fuels, because the location of the volcano was also one with a lot of buried coal and natural gas waste; the magma essentially boils them away and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the process. But the Late Permian took a long time to happen, at least when we think about it on human time scales. In geological time it was relatively fast, at about 200,000 years or less. But it has only been about 200 years or so at a maximum that we burn fossil fuels on Earth and even then we see the effects on climate.
However, one of the things that makes comparison with deep time quite complicated is our current continental configuration and where important mountain ranges are located. As other major mass extinctions have occurred in the past, our continents have been in very different positions. We have had the supercontinent Pangea out of shape, present or breaking apart. There were completely different ocean currents due to continental borders. When continents all sit together, bad things can happen in terms of climate extremes.
One of the other complicating factors is sea level because it interacts with topography. For example, in the Late Devonian – a time period characterized by the transition from a glass garden to an ice house climate and another one of the most important mass extinctions in the history of the Earth) – we have continental topographies that have many domestic, shallow, limited sea support. There are no real analogues to this seaway in the modern continental configuration.
The way our continents are now configured, we are probably a little more protected from catastrophic climate change than we would be if our continents were in a different position. But again, we are in completely uncharted territory in terms of the rapid velocity and the rate of carbon dioxide emissions, so I can not predict any concrete scenario here.
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Abigail Mechtenburg
Assistant Professor Professor of Physics and Physics Laboratory Co-Director at the University of Notre Dame
I’m working on something that tends to be ignored: electricity failure in hospitals in low- to middle-income countries. If fossil fuels are no longer available – especially if it happens abruptly, which it will potentially – we will see patients die in hospitals and health care facilities as a result of electricity failure, and this will be very acute in natural disasters.
At present, the World Health Organization does not have a specific policy on how to deal with electricity faults. Large percentages of the population already have a shortage of fossil fuels. They have health care, but because electricity fails and diesel and gas are too expensive, patients die. Why is this happening? It’s not because of a shortage – it’s because fewer fossil fuels in the ground have led to higher prices. They have been going down lately, of course, but even at their current prices, there are countries that are struggling to get it for their hospitals.
Fossil fuel exports will also seriously affect transportation. The only reason we’re even halfway able to survive via covid-19 is that we can send things. If we suddenly cannot fly as we do now, our global economy will be confined to a semi-local state.
Will it all happen? It depends on human choices. But we must also live with a serious degree of uncertainty – we may not know it. That said, I’m sure we’re screwed in a hundred years.
Edward S. Rubin
Professor of Engineering and Public Policy and Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University
The quick (somewhat slippery) answer to your hypothetical question is that we will never run out of fossil fuels completely, because that last barrel of oil, cubic feet of gas, or tons of coal would be too expensive and therefore stay in the ground! Instead, we would turn to other available energy sources, such as renewable (wind, solar, hydro, biomass, etc.) and often nuclear. If energy supplies were restricted for any reason, energy requirements would have to be adjusted to meet available supplies in that hypothetical world, and the available energy would be used much more efficiently.
Jessica Kaminsky
Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington
We will eventually shift to sustainable electricity; we have no other option if we assume that we want the human species to continue to exist (see: climate change), and assume that we do not care to do without lights and the internet and etc, etc. The answer to the question of what happens if we stop using fossil fuels (probably because we decide that the environment as an economic cost is too high) depends on when this happens, or rather how much technology is through that time. advanced. Specifically, we still need advances in batteries and storage, because wind and solar generation are not always available on demand, and existing storage technologies are still expensive.
If we stop using all fossil fuels sooner rather than later, we would have to decide if we want to accept higher electric prices than lower electric reliability. If we can live with the lights that most, but not always work in a lot of the net, we do not have to invest so much in expensive storage. In that case, places like hospitals or research laboratories that cannot accept a reduction in reliability in electricity can pay for microgriders to supplement the larger grid in which they exist. Many as well as most people assume that lower reliability is not a politically viable option. Another question is whether society would consider nuclear power generation for electric generation. Personally, I have no nuclear concern because I believe the risks of catastrophic failures and waste management are too high, but there are many people who do not agree with me and think of it as an underutilized and carbon efficient ( no direct carbon emissions) electric source.
To my mind, the more interesting or at least temporary question is, what happens when we stop using it so much fossil fuels to generate electricity. For example, in the US we are already at a technological point where a very large percentage of our electricity—sokssawat as 80%– can come from sustainable. The cost-effectiveness and reliability of this are also pretty decent, especially if we can meet a very small percentage of the total electrical demand with various technologies. And this financial argument for renewable energy will only get stronger if costs for solar continue to pump – it’s all the option for low cost, without subsidy, in some markets.
Ken Caldera
Emeritus Senior Scientist, Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution of Science
There is 1,000,000 billion tons of reduced carbon in the earth’s sedimentary shell, so we’ll never run out of fossil fuels. It is just that in the end, the amount of effort you have to put into extracting the carbon becomes greater than the amount of benefit you gain by burning that carbon.
There is an abundance of wind, solar, and nuclear energy. With enough electricity, fuels can be synthesized by taking hydrogen from water and carbon, either from plants or directly from CO2 in the atmosphere. These carbon-neutral fuels can be used for long-distance jets and other applications that require very dense energy storage.
I do not see the running of fossil fuels as a problem. Perhaps the bigger problem is that we fossil fuels are not fast enough to protect us from dangerous climate change.
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