I was working in the garden last weekend.
The weather was all over the show so I didn’t really want to but, because I’d spent the previous weekend gratuitously hacking bits off trees and blocked part of our driveway with branches, they needed to be dealt with somehow. So, I borrowed a swanky electric crusher-mulcher thing from a friend and started feeding it num-nums.
Tired and rained on and generally grumpy, several hours later, I considered what I had achieved. In one afternoon, I’d turned a car-sized pile of branches—some as thick as my forearm—into thousands of little pieces of leaves and wood.
Well, technically, I didn’t turn it into mulch so much as the swanky mulcher thing did.
Because of all the ‘labour-saving’ tools and easy-to-consume things available in the world we live in, most of us have little idea how much energy we use daily. We toss about terms like “250 Horsepower engine” and “2000W heater” in casual conversation, but what do those things mean?
Not “What do the numbers mean?”, but “How might they be relevant to our future?”
This is hyper-important because, right now, we’re all assuming one of two things1 is going to save us from the impending disasters of climate change:
Some genius is going to invent a thing that efficiently sucks carbon dioxide out of the air; or fusions nuclei together to make unlimited clean power; or lasers the sun’s power down from solar satellites; or turns seawater into liquid hydrogen using a combination of random herbs and spices you can find in the back of your kitchen cupboard, or…
We are going to reduce our energy use.
Some people think solar panels, wind turbines, and EVs should fit into that first one. And, sure, we need to transition from less efficient and safe energy segments, and these maybe tools for that end. But these things don’t rise at scale, fully-formed from the earth. They are all going to require substantial new resource use to build.
And, many of the tech solutions also don’t unspend our fossil fuel deficit. At best they (slowly) reduce new spending.
And, at worst, they tangentially permit us to consume even more.
Let’s back up though, and put the problem with our energy use into perspective.
A barrel of standard Brent Crude oil costs (as of the moment I’m writing this sentence) US$84.38. That is the cost of a nice dinner out with your significant other; the cost of a few weeks of clarinet lessons for your kid; the cost of no-where-near-enough litres of housepaint to paint a house; a couple of weeks of fruit and vegetables; a couple of days of rent… It’s not actually a whole lot of money. But let’s forget about money, and think about what it’s worth.
Right up front, let me say these calculations are rough and simplistic and are designed to make you think, not to revolutionise our collected understanding of physics. The biggest challenge they face is in trying to compare ‘stored energy’ which gets released over time (kWh), to the ‘exerted energy’ of power output (kW).
For example, a 2000W heater outputs 2kW of heat, but will use just 1kWh of power if left on for 30 minutes (that is, half an ‘h’-for-hour)
A barrel of crude oil translates to roughly 1700kWh of stored energy.
A single (metric) horsepower translates to roughly 0.7kW of expendable energy. So, hypothetically, 10 solid hours from a one-horsepower horse—dragging kids around the paddock on a toboggan or whatever—will use 7kWh.
A single ordinary human working moderately hard translates to perhaps 0.2kW. So, 10 solid hours of pretty intense work might add up to 2kWh.
Realistically, no horse or human can work at those sorts of levels for very long. A well-rested and fed labourer working a somewhat-physical job might average closer to 0.07kWh over the course of an 8-hour working day. But, of course, oil is not like that. Oil, and other fossil fuels, are potential energy that you just turn on, and then use as effectively as you can until they run out.
The beauty of fossil fuels is that they are made of sunlight, stored up over timescales that we couldn’t possibly conceive of, let alone replicate. That ceaseless energy that allows us to run our modern world is borrowed, in highly concentrated form, from the past and will be paid for, also in concentrated form, by the future—as anthropogenic devastation; and also in the enforced future citizens’ sacrifice caused by our selfish consumption of hundreds of millions of years of the earth’s ‘banked’ energy over the space of just a few, short, “peak-oil” generations.
We have taken thousands of years of sunlight and priced it the same as a moderately-nice dinner out. I’m not certain we really appreciate what we’ve got here.
…Back to our calculations:
That single barrel of oil is a well-fed labourer working a regular job (250 x eight-hour days a year) for over 12 years.2
You can hold the equivalent of four days of human labour in your cupped hands.
Now, you’re likely calling “bullshit” on that. But let’s put it this way, crude oil gets turned into about 1/2 the volume of gasoline, once refined; and a litre of gasoline might take a typical modern family car 15-20km. So, let’s say, a good handful of crude oil translates to 1-2km in that car.
You’re thinking: “I reckon I could push an average (1600kg) car 2km in an hour or two! Easy!” And, you’re kind-of right, it would take a shit-load more energy than you’d spend on an average day at the office, but a fit human could certainly push a car 2km.
Right. Now do it at 90km/h, up a slight incline, with three suitcases and four passengers on board, while cooling the temperature inside the car by 10 degrees, illuminating 60m of the road in front of you, powering the stereo, charging two mobile phones and a dashcam, and winding the backseat windows up and down annoyingly the whole way...3
We rarely think about how much fossil fuels are worth—unless we’re literally filling up our car—but the (low) price of oil is at the heart of all our consumption. It is very literally the foundation on which we have built our modern civilisation of transport, trade, extraction, manufacture, and finance. Alongside any excess amongst them.
Is it any wonder that we fucking love fossil fuels?
Both coal and natural gas have been hugely advantageous to us in the past couple of hundred years (and have well-documented disadvantages which, frankly, you’re probably not my kind of newsletter-reader if you’re not already savvy about!). But oil is the king of the fossil fuels: It’s energy-dense and can be refined to be even more effective; it is used to make plastics and other materials; and it’s even a feature in a chunk of the manufacture of ammonia-based fertiliser that literally allows us to feed our 8 billion bodies4.
It goes without saying, we are (mostly) trying to ween ourselves off oil and other fossil fuels, but it seems likely we’re not moving near fast enough. The emissions we put into the atmosphere and the ecological damage we do to access those sweet-sweet-emission-making kWhs have a multi-decade fuse on them. A tonne of carbon dioxide emitted now is a problem for your grandchildren; just as your parents’ and grandparents’ emissions are increasingly your (flood-fire-drough-refugee) problem.
I don’t want to sound like I’m dismissing what we’ve achieved, powered by fossil fuel energy. I’m not advocating for a managed retreat back to partially-cooked-chicken, feuding warlords, and “bring out your dead!” mud-and-shit-filled-streets. But we’ve got to have better choices than “Ibiza party like it’s the end of the world” hedonism; razor-wire boltholes in the South Island of Aotearoa; or hoping AI will “save us from ourselves” techno-optimism.
And there are good ideas out there, under such headings as Donut Economics, the 2000-Watt Society, and the Degrowth Movement. It’s just, things like that have a social-absorption problem: Before any of those ideas can be accepted, we need to first appreciate just how much our consumption is worth. To align minds to a common purpose, you first need to align perspectives.
We might all sit down and have a nice kōrero (respectful chat) about it, and we’ll undoubtedly conclude that fossil energy is kick-ass. After all, it’s literally bottleable progress! But, educated about its real worth, we might also start to respect it a bit more. We might respect the work the past put into saving that sunlight for us, and we might respect its value to the future.
We humans think we’re pretty dang clever. We think we’ve nutted out really efficient ways to value stuff, with all our money, and our supply/demand curves, and our trade, and globalisation, and resource extraction.
We have not.
We’ve built it all on the shaky framework of the biggest value mismatch in the history of humanity: $84.38 for 12 years of human effort.
That time over dinner with your partner is valuable. But we need to start understanding the ribeye steak with almond crust and yellow-fin tuna ceviche, delivered to your manicured table then cleared away, back to the gas-powered kitchen, as you swipe your shiny new imported smartphone over the payment terminal—like all our daily consumption—comes at a higher cost than that money you’re spending on it might suggest.
-T
Maybe ‘one of three things’ if you count “Moving to Mars” like the weird corners of the internet do… I’m not going to right now.
You probably don’t care, but for reference, an oil barrel is around 159 litres and 1700kWh of energy (10.7kWh/litre). That translates to just over 3035 eight-hour days when you’re outputting 0.07kW per hour. At 250 working days per year, that’s a little over 12 years of work.
A 200ml “handful” of crude oil will produce around 100ml of gasoline, plus a bunch of other energy-expelling stuff, which I’m simplifying for the sake of this example. A mid-range car, with (not-exceptional) ~7L/100km economy, will drive 15-20km on a litre of gas, or 1.5-2km on 100ml (that 200ml refined), thus using around 2.14kWh from that oil barrel (200ml of crude). That 2.14kWh is therefore equivilent to just over 3.8 eight-hour days, exerting an average 0.07kW per hour (or around 0.6kW per day).
I acknowledge that none of this ‘spent labour energy’ accounts for human creativity. Obviously, this leaves a potentially big ‘capability’ gap between an inanimate black puddle and a human, but I also don’t have the (personal) creative energy to come up with a way to measure ‘human creative potential’ in kWh so I’m quietly just ignoring that!