The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  Unlike oil, coal was formed primarily by ancient forests of the Carboniferous era around three hundred million years ago. On land, this was the age of giants. The skyscrapers then were tall fern-like trees that towered over forty-five metres high above a landscape covered in thick, rich vegetation. In this hot, humid jungle, buzzing with massive insects, the trees were notably different from today’s. Their roots didn’t reach very far into the ground, and when the trees fell over, their whole, massive trunks accumulated in the forest swamps. Microbes that could digest the trees’ cellulose and lignin had not evolved yet, so instead of rotting, the trees stayed whole and their carbon remained inside them. Over time, as more and more trees accumulated on the forest floor, the wood compressed into peat, and over millions of years it became the coal we use today.

  These ancient forests have warmed our homes, powered transportation, run our machines and factories, and brought us electricity. But burning coal releases a choking amount of pollution. It blackened the skies during the Industrial Revolution, just as it creates unbreathable smog in China and India today. The toxic transmutation of coal also contributes to climate change. That’s because for every ton of coal burned, almost triple that amount of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.

  Because of this, coal is thankfully and finally being phased out. Countries around the world are shutting old coal power plants down, but coal still contributes to our daily power use far more than renewables do. On the grid, it’s responsible for 30 percent of the electricity made.*14

  Oil on the other hand, and the petrol that we pump into our cars, came primarily from marine life. In our ancient oceans, the waters were buzzing with a fascinating array of microscopic creatures. Just as a teaspoon of seawater would reveal a colourful bonanza of life today, looking under a microscope at the ancient seas, you’d see tiny zooplankton, phytoplankton,*15 and algae, as oblivious to our existence as we are to theirs.

  It’s often asked if larger animals like dinosaurs got into the mix. While it is possible, it should be noted that a significant amount of today’s oil was deposited long before dinosaurs walked the earth. Some of the oil fields that we tap today are up to six hundred million years old. So while a few molecules of dinosaur here and there may be fuelling your ride to the supermarket, relatively speaking, compared to the vast amount of tiny plants and animals that make up our oil, dinosaurs have made an insignificant contribution.

  Instead, this prehistoric stew formed as a constant flow of marine organisms died and drifted down to the sea floor. Buried under layers of silt and mud, in low oxygen conditions, they did not decay but rather formed into a waxy substance called kerogen. Typically, geologists note that “oil forms from organic matter that is either ‘cooked’ deep within the earth for long periods of time at low temperatures, or ‘cooked’ for short periods of time at high temperatures.” Over time, the kerogen molecules break apart into hydrogen and carbon atoms. The heavier liquid mixture cooked at 50°C to 100°C turns into oil, and the lighter mixtures that were cooked at higher temperatures of 150°C to 250°C bubble up into rocky chambers and turn into gas.

  Together, oil, coal, and gas are nature’s oldest battery, one that took anywhere from a million to an average of a hundred million years to charge. That we have power to run modern civilization is because microscopic organisms captured ancient sunlight through the process of photosynthesis, just as today the sun feeds plants that in turn are eaten, as “food batteries,” to fuel animals. The only difference with fossil fuels is we don’t eat this ancient sunlight ourselves; it is food for our machines.

  Today, the Middle Eastern oil states derive their bounty from an accident of geology. They were situated on the perimeter of the Tethys Ocean as the fossil fuels formed. The region is still responsible for the majority of the world’s oil—two-thirds—and a quarter of its supply of gas. The bulk of the fuel comes from prehistoric life, formed by conditions in the Cretaceous.

  It should not be lost on you, dear reader, that we are beginning to see parallels in our own warming world. Right now, as you read this, whole shelves of ice at the poles are calving and crashing into the ocean. At the equator, the surface temperature of the ocean is like bathtub water at a very warm 30°C. Anoxic waters are also spreading, and while they are nowhere as severe as what existed during the Cretaceous,*16 scientists have already documented a 2 percent decrease in the oceans’ oxygen levels over the last fifty years, and this silent creep of anoxic water *17 has grown by over 4.5 million square kilometres. To offer some perspective, that’s the size of the European Union.

  For most of us, what takes place underwater is out of sight and out of mind, but scientists who are researching oxygen-starved waters are deeply concerned. Along with local die-offs of bottom-dwellers like sea stars, crabs, and anemones, deep-sea fish like marlin and sailfish that often feed at depths of up to eight hundred metres have recently been tracked feeding in much shallower waters. Scientists studying sailfish off the coast of Central America found that they were no longer venturing deeper because of a huge sink of oxygen-depleted water. The fish were staying up in the shallows because if they ventured farther into the band below, they would suffocate.

  While we tend to think of oxygen as important here on land, we forget that the dissolved gas is just as vital to sea life as it is to terrestrial life up above. Imagine if vast regions of our air saw a similar decrease in oxygen: it would choke out the life that surrounds us.

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  HUMANS ARE THE ONE SPECIES on Earth with artificial superpowers. We have taken the power of the dead, the power of the sun, the power of the wind, the power of water, even the power of invisible atoms, and we have harnessed all of this energy and transformed it so we can control the world around us beyond our natural capabilities. And while we may grow up reading about Superman in the comic books, picturing his skills as extraordinary, human beings now have the same superpowers, except we access them with the flip of a switch. Everything Superman can do—flight, X-ray vision, super strength, speed, heat vision, freezing breath, and the super flare (an explosive, omnidirectional blast that obliterates anything within a half kilometre radius)—we can do, as long as we have sufficient energy and the right technology. We can fly around the planet. We can fly into outer space. We can see and hear what’s happening in different parts of the world as it happens. To our cave-dwelling ancestors, we would seem to possess magic. We would appear as powerful as gods.

  Most of us know little about where it really comes from, or how it works; the source of humanity’s power is a blind spot. But our power is also our kryptonite. Because energy is so accessible—there with the push of a button or the turn of a key in the ignition—we are blind to how much of it we use. The energy we require to keep us alive is about two thousand calories a day, which works out to approximately ninety watts, or the equivalent of one light bulb of energy for our metabolism. But cumulatively, to power all of our modern “stuff,” we require much, much more. As physicist Geoffrey West writes, “We now require homes, heating, lighting, automobiles, roads, airplanes, computers, and so on. Consequently, the amount of energy needed to support an average person living in the United States has risen to an astounding 11,000 watts. This social metabolic rate is equivalent to the entire needs of about a dozen elephants.”

  As a global society, these needs are even further amplified. Together, we use approximately 150 trillion kilowatt hours of power a year. The world’s citizens number approximately 7.5 billion, but our annual energy use is enough to supply a population of 200 billion.

  As a result, we are pumping a frightening amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And yet we do so little about it. Why? As M. Sanjayan, a senior scientist at Conservation International, explains, “Right now there is CO2 pouring out of tailpipes, there is CO2 pouring out of buildings, there’s CO2 pouring out of smoke stacks, but you can’t see it. The fundamental cause of this problem is largely invisible to most of us.”*18
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  What we don’t realize and don’t physically see is that the underground reservoirs of fuel we are tapping contain five times more carbon than the invisible reservoir of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The carbon cycle, in which carbon naturally moves through the atmosphere, takes three years; it remains in plants on average for five years, in soils for thirty years, in oceans for three hundred years, and goes through the geochemical cycle once every 150 million years. But in a very fundamental way, we are messing with this natural cycle by artificially injecting carbon found deep underground into the atmosphere. Today, there is 45 percent more carbon dioxide in the air than there was before the Industrial Revolution. The last time this much CO2 was in the air was over eight hundred thousand years ago.

  Once we’ve used it, the energy for our superpowers seems to vanish into thin air. But that’s the grand irony: countries will go to war to decide who owns the hydrocarbons and then countries gather to decide who does not own the carbon dioxide.

  In the end, however, there may be a clear way to visualize the heat buildup from all the fossil fuels that are burned. According to climatologist James Hansen, the unseen rate at which our planet is warming is the equivalent of dropping four hundred thousand Hiroshima bombs every single day.

  *1 It was Thomas Edison, famed inventor and creator of the first DC electric utility, who began tucking Manhattan’s “black spaghetti” of wires away from sight. After much convincing, New York’s mayor reluctantly allowed Edison to dig up the city streets and lay down eighty thousand feet of underground wiring to bring “electric light” to people’s homes. Edison’s utility project however did not last, however, as he was outdone by another famed inventor: Nikola Tesla. Tesla’s alternating current (AC) power delivery systems could move electricity over much longer distances. This meant that generators weren’t eyesores, and could be built far away from populated cities, but it also meant that our source of energy would be hidden from us.

  *2 As Bakke notes, the average outage in the United Staes is 120 minutes and growing year by year; in other nations it’s ten minutes and shrinking.

  *3 You might be surprised to know that the electrons are moving down the wire incredibly slowly, as in — slower than tortoises. We’re talking a drift speed of about 1 meter per hour. As tiny subatomic particles, electrons aren’t orderly. They move in a haphazard way. And in an alternating current (AC), which is what is on the grid today, the electrons are constantly taking a few steps forward and a few steps back.

  *4 Lithium is also mined from hard rock pegmatite. This is a more traditional type of mining, sourcing the metal from ore, and is common in Australia and parts of China.

  *5 That is, minus all the energy that has been absorbed in photosynthesis, or the hydrological cycle, or the many other indispensable things the sun provides.

  *6 Where nature’s waterfalls are not available artificial falls are created in the form of engineered gradients where a drop in land elevation is used to channel rushing water down tunnels via gravity to achieve the same thing.

  *7 Today, Niagara Falls churns out almost 2 million kilowatts of power on the Canadian side, and 2.4 million kilowatts of power on the US side.

  *8 By 2020, the number is expected to increase to approximately 100 million barrels per day.

  *9 Oil price spikes can have a huge impact on the military, costing billions of dollars for every $10 dollars that a barrel goes up. Because of this, the military is also spearheading the use of green and solar technologies.

  *10 If you take two open soda cans and leave one at room temperature and put the other in the fridge, the colder one will be fizzier, as it can hold more dissolved gas. The same holds true of ocean water. Colder water can “hang on” to oxygen, while warmer waters release it into the atmosphere.

  *11 Researchers say there were between two and seven large oceanic anoxic events in the mid-Cretaceous.

  *12 University of Alberta scientists have evidence to suggest that underwater volcanism may have been responsible for a mass extinction event 93 million years ago which led to the formation of major oil reserves.

  *13 A gallon (4 litres) of gasoline contains thirty-one million calories.

  *14 Coal demand has declined in Europe and the US, but has been offset by demand in India and other Asian countries.

  *15 Sunlight causes the bloom of over 5.5 billion metric tons of phytoplankton every year. These single-celled protists, which capture the sun’s energy, are the primary producers of the food chain, capturing the sun’s energy. Their cumulative death over millions of years captured and stored this energy, essentially making oil what is is: a massive natural battery.

  *16 Geochemist Martin Fowler has suggested that the levels of anoxia in the Cretaceous would be more like what we see in the Dead Sea.

  *17 “Already naturally low in oxygen, these regions keep growing, spreading horizontally and vertically. Included are vast portions of the eastern Pacific, almost all of the Bay of Bengal, and an area of the Atlantic off West Africa as broad as the United States…The zone off West Africa that’s as big as the continental United States has grown by 15 percent since 1960—and by 10 percent just since 1995. At 650 feet (200 metres) deep in the Pacific off southern California, oxygen has dropped 30 percent in some places in a quarter century.”

  *18 How huge is this blind spot? It is so all-encompassing that we may not even see the problem when we’re driving around in it. Cars with low gas mileage are obviously part of the problem. But what is less obvious is that, depending on where you live, your hybrid or electric vehicle might not be any cleaner than a gas-guzzling SUV. About a third of our electricity comes from coal, which is about as dirty as fuels come. Meaning, in some places, even the solution is part of the problem. Think of the fossil fuels that go into mining and smelting, manufacturing, transporting, and assembling a wind turbine before it starts pumping “clean” electricity into the grid, and you begin to glimpse just how deeply wedded even the most ambitious plans for the future are implicated in the energy of the past.

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  TRASH & TREASURE

  We are fast becoming a plastic society. Pretty soon, we will have more in common with Ken & Barbie than with our natural environment.

  —ANTHONY T. HINCKS

  IN OUR MIND’S EYE, the grey, cratered landscape of the moon is untouched. Up there still are the iconic first human footprints, the American flag, and a plaque that reads, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

  After five decades on the moon, however, the flag has begun to surrender to the elements. Bleached by harsh UV rays from the sun, the Stars and Stripes have disappeared and the nylon has faded to white. But the Americans didn’t just plant one flag on the moon; they planted six. And space travellers have left a much heavier footprint than simple human tread marks. Littering the lunar surface are 181,000 kilograms of forgotten trash.

  According to NASA, along with ninety-six bags of urine and vomit, there are old boots, towels, backpacks, and wet wipes. With no garbage cans at hand, the astronauts also littered the landing site with magazines, cameras, blankets, shovels. And after several international missions, there are now seventy spacecraft on the surface, including crashed orbiters and rovers.

  Compared to Earth, the moon has a very thin atmosphere,*1 so it will take some time for the evidence of our visits to erode and disappear. Arizona State University scientist Mark Robinson suggests that with the impact of particle-sized micrometeorites hitting the garbage, the evidence of our brief stays on moon will break down and be gone in about ten to a hundred million years.

  Viewed from the lunar surface, our own planet rises above the horizon and shines into the night like a blue moon. From a distance, it too looks pristine, but up close you would see a gleaming cloud of space junk orbiting Earth. Our planet has come to resemble Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comic strip. Right now, there’s almost three thousand metric tons of space junk continuously circl
ing us.

  This wasn’t always the case, of course. In the 1950s, Earth orbit was junk-free. It was not until March 17, 1958, that it acquired a permanent resident. Today, this dead satellite, the Vanguard 1, holds the title of the oldest piece of orbital debris. It completes a full revolution around Earth every 132.7 minutes. But it is no longer alone. It’s been joined by more than 29,000 other pieces of space junk invisibly circling us, along with over 1,700 active satellites. The U.S. Air Force has been tracking orbital debris, which is mostly made up of spent rocket stages and decommissioned satellites, and keeps a record of any object larger than a baseball. Parts do break loose that are smaller. Everything from paint chips, nuts, bolts, bits of foil, and lens caps are among the 670,000 objects that are one to ten centimetres in size.

  As the size of the objects decreases, the number of them increases. For debris that ranges from a millimetre to a centimetre in size, the number is approximately 170 million. But just because they are small doesn’t mean they are harmless. According to the European Space Agency, a one-centimetre object moving at orbital speed could penetrate the International Space Station’s shields or disable a spacecraft. The impact would have the energy equivalent of an exploding hand grenade.

  But we don’t only dump our spacecraft in space. We also dump them in the sea. In the Pacific Ocean, miles under the waves, is a site called Point Nemo, which serves as a spacecraft cemetery. Chosen for its remoteness (the closest land mass is nearly 2,400 kilometres away), it is where international space agencies discard large space objects that don’t burn up in the atmosphere upon re-entry. From 1971 to 2016, over 260 spacecraft were dumped at Point Nemo. The junkyard became the final destination for 140 Russian resupply vehicles, a SpaceX rocket, the Soviet-era Mir space station, and several of the European Space Agency’s cargo ships, all of which lie on the ocean floor, slowly disintegrating.