All the coal in the ground was made in one specific period of history when trees were “new” and there was nothing that broke down dead trees for food. Trees that die now do not become coal. No new coal is being made.
That whole story about how long it took for fungus or anything to evolve to the point it could break down trees was a fascinating surprise to me, that also highlighted how evolution works.
However nowadays, I see it mostly as important to share from the perspective of both climate change and cultural resilience. We all know the connection to climate change, but ….
I love watching apocalypse movies, but an op Ed I read really struck home. The premise was that if there were enough of a disaster to knock humanity back a century or more, we would never be able to recover. So many easy sources of energy through fossil fuels have been picked clean to where they are no longer recoverable without modern technology, and we can’t get back to modern technology without Easy sources of energy. Fossil fuels in general were created once. There are no new ones created. But there are no substitutes that would let a re-building society pass that level of development.
That’s a very interesting story if you think about it. I would say that it is possible to reach our technology level again without fossil fuels. It just takes a lot longer. The biggest issue for this is getting materials as steel or copper. Wind turbines are relatively simple and don’t need that much technology. As a more stable form of energy production we have trees and bio mass. It would cost a lot of our trees to get back to our current state, but I think it’s possible. You just have to remember to not make the same mistakes again.
Wind turbines are certainly doable at be lower technology levels, but how do you scale that up to enough power density for things like refining metals? How could you even have enough of an iron or steel industry to build things, including tools? Concrete? Glass? Chemicals? How would appliances ever be cheap enough for home/personal use?
