Thoughts on Energy

I never really thought about how cool fossil fuels are until recently with all the focus on energy with Al Gore, and all the oil spills, and what-not. We have been living in a time between the industrial revolution when we figured out that there were relatively unlimited energy resources (when we already knew how to do everything without the help from robots) right under our noses, and a time hopefully when we have become more aware of the consequences of using certain types of energy resources. In this era we take for granted that we can make energy collected from the sun into work that we used to have to do, allowing us time to reflect on how naive and soft we are.

Coal is pretty cool when I think about it. It's like a whole crap-load of heat energy is stored in magic rocks, and you just heat it up a little and then the massive amount of energy inside gets released in a very manageable way. These rocks were created by a lot of time and a geological process that made these rocks out of ancient ferns. These ferns spent their entire lives as natural solar panels, storing our star's energy biologically.

We also refine other hydrocarbons we pull out of the ground into things like petrol, as they say Britishly. We make this translucent liquid plastic which is so full of energy that if we create a little spark (which is easy to do nowadays), the energy is released explosively. I know diesel works differently, but I'm not a freaking scientist, if you haven't figured that out by now, and don't you have something better to do than read and criticize my blog? Anyway, we can simply pour this blessed liquid into machines and they come to life, and we have refined the whole process so that it is so clean that when it burns, it will kill us before we can even smell the waste left over from the whole process.

With my new appreciation for these fuels, I wish we could use these resources in a way which isn't so destructive to the environment where we need to survive. It seems we would have figured the solution out by now if there was one within our technological grasp. I think it comes down to the whole burning thing.

We need to create electricity without burning anything. We have discovered a lot of ways to do this. The second worst type of energy resources still create a lot of heat, like nuclear power- but that waste is more manageable, although arguably more dangerous in some ways, because it might stick around longer than other types of waste affecting even more life on the planet long after we "kill ourselves off" as they say so adorably. Not such a proud legacy if anyone really cares.

We should now use these awesome but life-form-reducing energy sources to build infrastructures of energy creation (conversion) and distribution that are less dangerous to ourselves and the other wanderers and greener folks hanging out on the surface of this rock. This is starting to sound preachy, so I will stop now. I was just thinking about how fossil fuels are cool because one of my favorite video games is Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars where you kill a bunch of people with different philosophies fighting over land and a resource which is as creative as it is destructive- tons of fun.