By Andrew Nikiforuk
By means of the winner of the Rachel Carson setting ebook Award
Ancient civilizations trusted shackled human muscle. It took the strength of slaves to plant vegetation, dress emperors, and construct towns. Nineteenth-century slaveholders considered critics as hostilely as oil businesses and governments now regard environmentalists. but the abolition circulation had an invisible best friend: coal and oil. because the world's such a lot flexible staff, fossil fuels replenished slavery's ranks with combustion engines and different labor-saving instruments. in view that then, reasonable oil has remodeled politics, economics, technology, agriculture, or even our inspiration of happiness. Many North americans this day stay as extravagantly as Caribbean plantation vendors. We think entitled to surplus strength and rationalize inequality, even barbarity, to get it. yet unending development is an illusion.
What we want, Andrew Nikiforuk argues during this provocative new e-book, is a thorough emancipation stream that ends our master-and-slave method of power. We needs to discover ways to use power on an ethical, simply, and actually human scale.
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Additional info for The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude
Example text
It is clearly a mistake to use 34 BLACKOUT the reserves-to-production ratio in forecasting future supplies. Moreover, the reserves figure, “984 billion tonnes,” which sounds solid and authoritative, is in fact arguable. Coal resources certainly exist in great quantities. But resources are of no use if they are inaccessible, are of exceedingly low quality, or are otherwise incapable of meeting the energy needs of modern industrial economies. Therefore we need better answers to the following four questions: • How much of the resource should currently be counted as reserves?
Campbell did hedge his estimate by pointing out that much of this coal was not minable, or was inaccessible for other reasons. ” Still, Campbell’s figure for total reserves was for many years taken at face value. Soon, state surveys began gathering more detailed and accurate information, which resulted in the downgrading of regional reserves. Thus, when the US Coal Commission mounted a new survey in 1923, it reduced all state reserves figures and dropped some states entirely from COAL IN THE UNITED STATES 41 its list of active or likely coal producers.
During this time production costs rose as well, though not at the same pace. The cost of producing coal is related to the price of oil. Consider the case of Massey Energy Company, the nation’s fourth-largest coal company, which annually produces 40 million tons of coal using about 40 million gallons of diesel fuel — about a gallon per ton (the company also uses lubricants, rubber products, and explosives, all made from petroleum or natural gas). If the price of diesel goes up one dollar, this 40 BLACKOUT translates directly to $40 million in increased costs; indirectly related costs also climb.