Автор работы: Пользователь скрыл имя, 04 Августа 2011 в 10:24, сочинение
Human beings have always relied on energy to grow their food, heat their houses, and to manufacture, power and maintain increasingly sophisticated machinery. It is almost impossible to imagine our lives without it. At the same time, people nowadays often find themselves in centre of great debates about the role of fossil fuels in our life. Fossil fuels transferred from being something that people almost admired to something that scares us. Increase in the utilization of fossil fuels starts from the Industrial revolution, now reaching its critical point.
Why have fossil fuels become the
dominant energy source for the modern world?
Human beings have always relied on energy to grow their food, heat their houses, and to manufacture, power and maintain increasingly sophisticated machinery. It is almost impossible to imagine our lives without it. At the same time, people nowadays often find themselves in centre of great debates about the role of fossil fuels in our life. Fossil fuels transferred from being something that people almost admired to something that scares us. Increase in the utilization of fossil fuels starts from the Industrial revolution, now reaching its critical point. Environmental campaigners, scientists, politicians, representatives of the fossil-fuel companies, such as Bp, Shell, and Esso, each of them has their own idea of fossil fuels’ presence and future, pitching in with their arguments. There is no doubt that fossil fuels are the dominant energy in the modern world, but why did it happen to become the key aspect of our life?
The aim of this essay is to try and
understand how did fossil fuels become dominant over other energies,
what is their future and if there are any other real alternatives to
it. I am going to analyze this, by going back into history of capitalism
and its role in increasing our dependence on fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels category includes oil, coal and natural gas. They all are called secondary resources because they are forms of stored solar energy. “Fossil fuels represent a minute fraction of the solar power that has reached the Earth during the past 400 Ma (the time since land plants first appeared) and has become converted through photosynthesis of plants and anaerobic decomposition, into hydrocarbon form. Only a small fraction of the hydrocarbons so produced is sufficiently concentrated to be commercially extractable as secondary energy resources; these comprise the fossil fuel bank.” (“Energy resources1: fossil fuels”, 1984, p.11)
Fossil fuels provided around 66% of
the world's electrical power, and 95% of the world's total energy demands
(including heating, transport, electricity generation and other uses).
(http://www.darvill.clara.net/
It is important to start talking about coal, because this particular fuel was so important in 18th century, when Industrial Revolution took off. It is impossible to imagine how fast lifestyle of people and their environment was changing. Manual labor was replaced by machinery and fossil fuels replaced wind, water, and wood primarily for the manufacture of textiles and the development of iron making processes. So why coal? This is due to the fact it can provide much more energy than wood. Coal is fossilized plant material, deposited 300 million years ago when Earth was warmer and wetter. Preserved and altered by geological forces over eons of time, this material was compacted into carbon-rich fuel. There were always sufficient reserves of coal. It was easier and it decreased the amount of time, which was spent on producing earlier. Coal is the most ample of the three fossil fuels and is now used (burnt) mostly for electricity generation. Coal provides around 28% of our energy around. As coal's relative importance declined, its absolute production grew roughly sevenfold between 1900 and 2005, to more than 4 billion t of bituminous coal and nearly 900 million t of lignites. (Smil V., 2010)
Next fossil fuel, which is the most important on our modern world, is oil. It did not play same role as coal did during the Industrial Revolution, because its consumption started in late 1800 and the beginning of 1900. It is easier to get oil out of the ground, than coal. Oil is used in our everyday life so much, that it is impossible to view our everyday routine without it. Petroleum is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons which exist naturally in gaseous (natural gas), liquid (crude oil) and solid (ashplant) state. We use it for many different purposes: fuels, like domestic gas, fuel oil for furnaces, kilns, smelters and steam boilers; motor fuel (petrol), jet aircraft fuel (kerosene) and diesel oil (Derv); lubricating oils and greases; waxes for candles. (“2 Energy Resources, 1973, p.39) Oil been almost exploited by capitalism in a way it turned it into one huge market. We even have such a thing as “paper oil”, as well as usual “wet oil”. There also many examples of conflicts, which oil provided. A well-known example is the Gulf War of 1991. People did not think about oil’s future, until 1949, when M. King Hubert predicted fossil fuel era will not as long as they expected.
Natural gas is a relatively new type
of fossil fuel. By 1999 more coal was used than natural gas. It is a
gaseous fossil fuel that is versatile, abundant and relatively clean
compared to coal and oil. Natural gas’s methods of extracting are
very similar to oil’s. “It may well represent a larger potential
source of energy than oil.”(Bartish U. and Muller B., 2000, p.135)
Even though the reserves of natural gas are distributed more evenly
all over the world, people are afraid to run out of it. Some predict
that it might happen in the middle of 21st century. (Enzler
S.M.)
In modern world, people are so spoiled, that they don’t even try to understand why fossil fuels became dominant. Not many asking themselves why we spend so much of these non-renewable resources. Many answers to these questions are hidden in how capitalism as an economic system uses energy. One of the problems of early capitalism that it was threatened to be damaged by ecological crisis it was creating. England’s forests were destroyed by the economy boom, because they were used as a primary source of both heating fuel and energy for smelting iron. In 1600 capitalist moved to Ireland, because some of wooden supply still remained there.
Another problem was a dropping richness of soil, caused by intensive agricultural nature of early capitalism. That was a critical situation for capitalism. Suddenly, it was saved. Help came from the discovery of distributed and easy to access fossil fuel resources within England. Main English resource was coal. “This use of coal not only solved the problem of household heating and iron production, but also encouraged the development of fossil fueled machinery in the form of steam engines in order to drain the coal mines.” (Keefer T., 2008-9, p.18)
Exploring and unlocking fossil fuels moved capitalism to a completely different level. At one hand, it was freed from a responsibility on solar energy, which was making their work much slower. It actually made possible for capitalism to become stronger on global level. According to Elmar Alvater, “As long as ‘the societal relationship with nature’ was based on biotic energies, on the soil and the fruit it bore, on the speed and range of an ox or horse drawn cart, on the tonnage, maneuverability and speed of a sailing vessel and on the art of navigation, the material possibility of overcoming these limits of space and time was slight and the capacity of creating a world order remained restricted.” Alvater E., 1998, p.20) He also argued, that without fossil fuels, there would no future for capitalism and a modern world monetary market.
If we look at the development of capitalist system from thermodynamic perspective, we can easily see that capitalism never had a problem with bring more and more energy every year. The nature of capitalism is growth. It needs growth to expand machinery, in order to displace human labor. Growth needs energy. Energy comes from fossil fuels. “Global energy inputs play an absolutely key role in keeping this vast array of machinery, transport systems, computers, lights and electricity grids going.” (Keefer T., 2008-9) It may be very difficult to extract fossil fuels, they might be dirty, toxic and harmful to human life, but capitalism does not care about it at all. The only goal it has, is to keep its economic system functioning and make a profit out of it.
The reason why fossil fuels are dominating
over other sources of energy nowadays is clear. If we look around, almost
everything is made with the help of fossil fuels. Capitalism developed
them, equaled them to the value of water, air, etc. fossil fuels are
dominating, because it is easier to increase economic situation. It
is also so popular, simply because we run out of it, we are about to
reach peaking oil (if not did already). That is why people are trying
to get as much, as they can. Nowadays, fossil fuels became a political
issue, in order to own oil, people do not mind to shed blood. It makes
me question if there is any alternative to this situation. Can modern
world survive without fossil fuels or at least do not use them as much
as we do now?
Obviously, this question is not new and there have been so many debates about it. Even capitalists themselves are trying to save fossil fuels, because it is dependent on them. So basically, now we are facing a dilemma-socialism vs. capitalism. As Hugo Chavez said in his speech in Vienna in May 2006: “The choice before humanity is socialism or barbarism… When Rosa Luxemburg made this statement, she was speaking of a relatively distant future. But now the situation of the world is so bad that the threat to the human race is not in the future, but now.” But despite the frightening trend and increasingly desperate calls by scientists around the world, the leadership of global corporations and political leaders show no signs of understanding what is happening and being ready to abandon these destructive policies, to review business practices and facilitate the mobilization of all forces and resources against impending disaster. Well, they offer different scenarios of fossil fuels’ future, but are they realistic?
Here are some alternatives. Some say, that we need a shift from dependence on oil to dependence on renewable energy sources-on radiation energy released by the sun, or on volcanic and geothermal energy. To my mind, this is quite an unbelievable perspective. Going back to solar energy means slowing down producing system, consumption, etc. Can capitalism survive in such conditions? It will be extremely difficult to think it will. Capitalism is all about growth, expansion, development. It cannot slow down, because it will be suicidal for it.
Although, according to Daniel Buck,
capitalism won’t fail, because ‘”when something becomes relatively
scares, its price will tend to rise”. It leads to reduces consumption
through economizing and also, increased extraction from too expensive
sources. He claims that capitalism is all about competition and soon
technological advancements will help to replace fossil fuels. But how
long is it going to take to innovate something new? Scientists cannot
be so sure about technologies, because not always technologies can replace
natural sources.
To conclude, it is important to say
that fossil fuels are already at an irreplaceable position in our life.
It took people long time to understand how coal, oil and gas can be
used, but such a short period of time to spend them. Capitalism exploited
fossil fuels to develop; it became dependent on them, and did not realize
how turned into a victim of its own actions became. I think that the
only adequate way out of this situation is to make people understand
how it is important to save fossil energy, to save our planet and lives.
The process will be long, but step by step we might change this situation.
“And with the very same mechanisms and effects that brought about
both the progress and the indelibly connected results of that progress
to our ecology – the good, the bad and the ugly – over the last 250
years, we will enter a new era of sustainability. That is the next revolution. “
(McLamb E., 2008)
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