Oil Barons Own the Earth

The arrival of geological limits to increasing fossil fuel production places a burden on the secondary economy, because the cost — measured in energy, labor and materials, rather than money — to extract fossil fuels does not depend on market forces. On average, that cost increases steadily as easily accessible reserves are depleted and have to be r

by 1650 the burning of fossil carbon supplies two-thirds of all heat; and the share reaches 75 percent by 1700.

Mass-scale car usage in Europe and Japan and the concurrent conversion of their economies from coal to crude oil, and later to natural gas, began only during the 1950s, as did the expansion of foreign trade and travel (including the first jetliners) and the use of petrochemical feedstocks for the synthesis of ammonia and plastics. Global oil extrac

The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the globa

This is not to say that people didn’t extract from the land or mine the mountains. They did; but they did so with careful decorum and rituals of respect. Miners, smiths and farmers offered propitiation. They believed they were permitted to take from the earth, as one might receive a gift, but that to take too much, or too violently, would invite ca