In a typical year, experts tell us, wealthy corporations around the world pump about 37 billion barrels of oil out the earth’s crust.
That’s about 37 billion more barrels of oil than were being extracted during any typical year prior to 1846, when the Russians started drilling oil wells in Azerbaijan.
We’re not even going to mention the amount of coal and natural gas extracted, because we don’t want anyone to become sick to their stomach.
But in the case of oil, we can feel satisfied that the Russians started this whole messy business.
And it’s definitely messy. Climate activists are marching, chanting, and staging sit-ins, calling for us to end our addiction to fossil fuels. UN Secretary General António Guterres hosted a climate summit in New York last month, where he declared that “humanity has opened the gates of hell.”
Actually, it was the Russians who opened the gates of hell.
As you can probably tell, I am not going to let the Russians off the hook, in this situation… even if UN Secretary General Guterres wants to blame all of us.
But what would happen if the world stopped drilling oil wells? That was a question posed by reporter Shannon Osaka last month, in the Washington Post.
Basically, nothing much. We already have enough operating wells to keep us polluting the air, soil, and water for many, many years.
But it would be a disaster for the oil companies themselves, because they are up to their necks in debt from drilling previous wells, at $100 million a pop, and the only way to pay down their existing debts is to borrow more money for future wells which will put them even deeper in debt.
It’s not a pretty picture, if you happen to own shares in ExxonMobil. Which I don’t. So I can talk about it, with a smug expression on my face.
It doesn’t take much energy to hold a smug expression, but it does take a certain amount.
Electrical energy, I mean. According to my recent research, the human body runs on electricity. An average person generates about 100 watts of power, just sitting in a chair reading the Daily Post. (Slightly more if they are maintaining a smug expression.) If we could plug ourselves into the grid, we could run our computers on our own electricity.
But it gets better. A middle-aged man, running at a moderate speed on a treadmill (while reading the Daily Post?) might generate 1,000 watts of electricity, or more. (Same with a middle-aged woman.) That’s more than enough power to run your microwave oven.
Scientists have done all the necessary calculations to find this out.
What they haven’t yet figured out, yet, is how to charge an electric car from human electricity.
So we are stuck with the current choices. Pay through the nose to the modern masters of the energy industry, or walk to the grocery store.
Hopefully, it’s a temporary problem.
That being said, I don’t own a treadmill, but I’m assuming that actively using my brain — thinking really, really hard (about things like climate change) — could also generate up to 1,000 watts.
That’s not scientifically proven, however.