Fossil Fuels are an Addiction.
I often like to compare fossil fuel addiction to heroin addiction …
To which I often get response that fossil fuels aren’t chemically addicting, they don’t change the brain’s chemistry, re-wiring it to crave more and more of them. But is that true? There is a lot of evidence that humans become as addicted to fossil fuels as opioids and that the behavior around fossil fuels is very similar to a person who is addicted to heroin, although fossil fuel addiction is much more socially acceptable.
Speed, warmth, light tickle and change our brains
Humans crave speed, warmth, and light — especially colorful lights. Our fossil fuel society makes such things very possible and easy to access. How to make people happier? Go faster, make it more comfortable, make it more bright and colorful.
Spending enormous amounts of money on the habit
Fossil fuel production and consumption is an enormous part of our economy. The average household spends $1,977 a year on gasoline alone. Is that amount of money spent to incinerate refined dinosaur bones, a largely non-sensible activity, is a classic sign of an addiction.
Denial of an addiction
Most people are in denial that they have a problem with fossil fuels and energy consumption more generally. They often dismiss how much energy they consume, they make excuses that it is necessary for modern living. People often react strongly when their utility rates or gas prices go up, or efforts are made to restrict motoring by reducing the number of lanes on roads or parking spaces.
Bizarre behaviors as a result of addiction
Addicts often engage in bizarre behavior when they high. Not only are people likely to defend oil and gas development in terrible places, they’re much too willing to accept climate change, as the price of fossil-fuel freedom. Wasting energy is totally acceptable, if it makes us happy.
Seeking alternative ways to get high
How do people plan to address the climate crisis? Usually it involves building industrial wind turbines and large solar farms, and switching to electric cars. Conservation is often pushed to margins of debate. And lifestyle change is dismissed as being impractical. People — at least on paper — want to address climate change by driving to Walmart in electric car.
1 Comment
You must know that I have no involvement whatsoever in the energy business and don’t like the way it is run. Before Rockefeller and Standard Oil, there wasn’t much dependence on fossil fuels. The industrial revolution used coal primarily, and it supported a larger world population. Oil and gas enabled the population to grow more, and today’s machine-intensive agriculture and distribution requires ever more fuel consumption. To reverse this to zero would require reducing the world population to about 1/4 of what it is now at a maximum, since solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, and more will never come close to covering expected minimum energy demand by themselves. Even in WW2, the millions killed were not enough to reverse the growing population trend. How much war, famine and pestilence are you willing to accept to get the required number of deaths to achieve sustainability? And do you want to live through that?