Thermodynamics and Fossil Fuels
Fossil fuels contain energy because plants absorbed sunlight or animals collected energy from the food chain, they concentrated it into small spaces, and then they died and were buried before their bodies could decompose. While our planetary environment was evolving out of the mud and up to the point that every single thing on Earth was part of the life cycle of something, and all those fossil fuels were being created, sunlight was shining on the Earth faster than heat was radiating off. That means that energy was being added to our global environment because some of it was being absorbed by the bio-chemical reactions and not being released. The energy was being stored in the molecular bonds of the big carbon molecules that biological processes were creating now. Then some of it was stored underground.
In the economic system of the universe, energy was still moving from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than it was moving from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration the whole time, simply because the sun is a lot bigger than the Earth and it’s 93 million miles away. Only about one billionth of the energy the sun gives off hits the Earth. The rest radiates away in other directions.
When you burn fossil fuels, you’re releasing sunlight that shone on the Earth hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. The Earth is basically the side of a battery with all the electrons in it, and outer space is the side of the battery without the electrons. When we burn fossil fuels, we’re making energy radiate off the Earth faster than it’s being replaced. We’re killing the battery because we’re using up its energy faster than the battery can be recharged.
As long as we depend on fossil fuels or any other non-renewable energy, we won’t stop destroying the environment. Learning to live within the physical limitations of the Earth, by definition, means learning to live with the energy that’s supplied by the sun. That means building an economy that’s powered almost entirely by sunlight. That means worldwide, localized organic agricultural economies.
While I’m on the subject of fossil fuels, eco-tourism can’t possibly save the environment. If you try to protect your local environment by using it to attract a lot of tourists and bring in a lot of money, how are the tourists going to get there? On bicycles? On horseback? In wooden sailing ships? Or by driving cars and riding in planes and burning a lot of fossil fuels? Where are they going to get those fossil fuels? They have to be extracted from someone else’s environment. That means that you’re saving your environment by helping to destroy even more of someone else’s environment.